[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 184 (Tuesday, December 4, 2007)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2475-E2476]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                IN RECOGNITION OF DR. SACVAN BERCOVITCH

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. MICHAEL R. McNULTY

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, December 4, 2007

  Mr. McNULTY. Madam Speaker, I am most pleased to recognize the 
outstanding contributions of Dr. Sacvan Bercovitch, the Powell M. Cabot 
Professor of American Literature Emeritus of Harvard University, who 
has been awarded the Bode-Pearson Prize for his outstanding 
contributions to American studies.
  Professor Bercovitch is the brother of a beloved constituent, Ninel 
Segal. He has been called ``one of the great literary historians of the 
20th century'' and ``one of the first American scholars to analyze the 
ideological and rhetorical functions of literature and to link art to 
political and cultural themes.'' Many of his works have been translated 
in French, German, Chinese, Italian, and others. I am pleased to insert 
into the Record the citation presented to Professor Bercovitch by the 
American Studies Association:

       ``Rare, extravagant spirits,'' says Emerson in his essay on 
     History, ``come to us at intervals, who disclose to us new 
     facts in nature.'' Tonight it gives me great pleasure, on 
     behalf of my fellow committee members, Elaine May and James 
     Miller, to award the Bode-Pearson prize to one such spirit, 
     indeed, the presiding spirit of American Studies, Sacvan 
     Bercovitch. Through his writings, intellectual projects, and 
     service to the Association, Professor Bercovitch has made an 
     unparalleled set of distinguished contributions over the last 
     30 years. Perhaps no single literary historian has exerted 
     the profound influence over his field that Bercovitch has, 
     for he has been the key figure in the ideological turn of 
     American literary study and the galvanizing source of its 
     interdisciplinary practice. If the American Studies community 
     is infinitely more robust than it was the last time the 
     Association met in Philadelphia in 1983 when tonight's 
     honoree was its president, it may well be the fruit of Sacvan 
     Bercovitch's labors. If this sounds extravagant, know that it 
     merely does justice to the extravagant bounty of his 
     learning, the extravagant scope of his inquiry, the 
     extravagantly searching range of his intellect, the 
     extravagant intensity of his example for three generations of 
     students, and the extravagant vitality of his commitment.
  Bercovitch began his career as an Americanist with his publication, 
in 1966, of an essay on Cotton Mather, but he had begun his informal 
study of America some years before. As a Canadian from Montreal's 
rough-and-tumble Yiddish-speaking quarter, his fascination with U.S. 
culture preceded his engagement with its literary traditions. While 
Bercovitch never lost that connection to his past, and indeed, 
translated several of the great Yiddish writers of the 20th century, 
his own American studies took him to the New School of Social Research, 
Reed College, Hightstown, New Jersey, where he trained to join a 
kibbutz in Israel, then on to Claremont college, where he took his 
graduate degrees, then to Brandeis, and UC-San Diego until he arrived 
at Columbia, where he was to stay for 13 years before taking his last 
academic post, at Harvard. Like Hawthorne's Holgrave, he worked at 
various trades, scholarly and otherwise, all of which contributed to 
the swell of consciousness that resulted in two paradigm-changing 
scholarly works of his early career: The Puritan Origins of the 
American Self (1975) and The American Jeremiad (1979).
  In the early 1980s, Bercovitch developed the intellectual 
underpinnings of the next great phase of his career, when he edited and 
co edited two seminal books of the era, Reconstructing American 
Literary History and Ideology and Classic American Literature. Let me 
remind you how influential those collections were when they appeared 
two decades ago. For the first, Bercovitch assembled an impressive 
line-up of scholars and literary historians whose work would resonate 
for years to come--like Sandra Gilbert, Walter Michaels, Werner 
Sollors, Wendy Steiner, Robert Stepto, and Eric Sundquist, scholars who 
made the case for profession only slowly--all too slowly--awakening to 
the realization that the literary history of the U.S. needed to be 
reconstructed; with Myra Jehlen, he showed that the urgency of that 
reconstruction was ideological and that classic American literature, 
the redoubt of liberal humanism, was nothing if not political, in a 
series of essays by Jonathan Arac, Houston Baker, Gerald Graff, Don 
Pease, Carolyn Porter, Jane Tompkins, and Alan Trachtenberg, among 
other distinguished contributors. These collections, in no small part, 
helped to reinvent the study of American literature and, in so doing, 
changed the future of this Association.
  Some of you will remember vividly what the Association's meetings 
were like as a direct consequence of Bercovitch's term, in San Diego, 
New York, and Miami, and can assure people who have only recently found 
a home here that the intellectual ferment of these years was dizzying, 
especially to the extent that it matched Sacvan Bercovitch's critical 
example: the cultural study of literature and literary study of culture 
broke wide open the intellectual boundaries of the Americanists' sense 
of the object of scholarly inquiry. That generation of scholars who 
changed the way we do business, if only because they followed the ways 
his work so vigorously aroused the possibilities of interdisciplinary 
study, through what Bercovitch called the ``reciprocities between 
symbolic and social systems.'' Moreover his leadership also gave the 
Association a new critical urgency, by moving it away from the 
hidebound, dry academicism that had dominated it for the previous two 
decades and toward public engagement. At the time there were many who 
resisted and not a few who resented this new direction, yet the growth 
of the Association might suggest just how sorely needed and how keenly 
received was the charge that Sacvan Bercovitch had laid before us. The 
ASA's sense of itself has evolved in the last ten years, and perhaps 
the role of cultural study of literature and the literary study of 
culture is not as crucial as it once was, but these changes have only 
been possible because of the difference that Bercovitch--his 
colleagues, students, and followers--first wrought.
       That charge was freshly shaped in his next great 
     contribution to American literary studies, his supervision of 
     the new Cambridge History of American Literature, brought to 
     completion only in the year before last. This project made 
     bold to rewrite, not as one book or two or even the four 
     volumes that its predecessor had essayed 70 years prior, but 
     as eight volumes written by some thirty scholars. The task 
     proved arduous, and perhaps its completion depended as much 
     upon the contributors' loyalty to Bercovitch as it did their 
     commitment to their assignment. The lesson rehearsed in page 
     after page of the History is ``dissensus,'' the vision of 
     literary history that rejects easy coherence and instead 
     accommodates the evidence of vivifying resistance out of 
     which a fuller, truer history may be understood--the turning 
     of the inside of literary texts out and the turning of 
     contexts in. Bercovitch's founding idea prompted a complex 
     way of imagining literary historiography, one that especially 
     enlivened the understanding of students and younger scholars, 
     so much so that the ``History'' that they created was largely 
     understood to be something of a generational enterprise. 
     Indeed, the influence of the Cambridge History can be 
     calculated in the way its separate parts have arrived with 
     all the authority of established wisdom; its arguments 
     crystallize the very terms of our practice over 20 years. In 
     this sense, its eight volumes are but the shell of a project 
     that will outlast us all.
       Bercovitch's own reading and research led him to Hawthorne 
     and inevitably The Scarlet Letter, but I will pass over the 
     great achievements of his scholarship, just as I also pass 
     over the dutiful recitations of his many, many honors and 
     awards, the editorial and advisory boards and executive 
     committees on which he has served, the consultantships, the 
     positions of leadership he undertook in a surprising variety 
     of places all too numerous to mention, in order to take a 
     final few minutes to recall his presidency of this 
     association. In so many ways, the current ASA is a wonderful 
     prism of his multifaceted accomplishments. Members of longer 
     standing than I will testify that Bercovitch ``saved'' the 
     ASA, by which they mean that during his tenure he undertook a 
     major effort to resuscitate and transform the organization. 
     At the time, ASA was wholly dependent on the University of 
     Pennsylvania and in debt a considerable amount of money to 
     them. Penn even held the copyright to AQ. Bercovitch 
     mobilized a number of influential ASA members, including past 
     president Daniel Aaron and Leo Marx, to change the modus 
     operandi. He also realized that, most of all, the culture of 
     ASA had to change, and beginning with a panel of luminaries 
     devoted to the organization's future at Philadelphia in 1983, 
     he undertook to reshape it into the entity we know today. As 
     part of a major re-evaluation, the association took ownership 
     of its journal, established new publishing arrangements, 
     raised new funds, relocated to Washington, DC, shifted to 
     annual meetings (although the planning for this began with 
     Bercovitch, Michael Cowan eventually pushed it through). 
     Plus, the ASA under Bercovitch began to internationalize, 
     reinvigorating ties with the Canadian and European 
     associations, even as it moved forcefully to diversify, 
     naming Martha Banta as program chair of the San Diego 
     conference, which, in turn, featured the work of several 
     future presidents--Mary Helen Washington, Stephen Sumida, 
     Vicki Ruiz--all of whom became involved in the organization 
     for the first time.
       In short, we might dedicate ourselves tonight to making ASA 
     worthy of this immeasurably rich legacy. So please join with 
     me and applaud, extravagantly, the career of

[[Page E2476]]

     Saki Bercovitch.--Gordon Hutner, Professor of American 
     Literature, University of Illinois, Editor, American Literary 
     History.

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