Sacvan bercovitch biography

Sacvan Bercovitch (October 4, 1933 – December 8, 2014) was a Canadian literary and cultural critic who spent most of his life teaching and writing in the.
Bercovitch was born in 1933 in a Jewish ghetto in Montreal.
Sacvan Bercovitch, who turned 75 in 2008, retired from the academy at the end of 2001.

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Sacvan Bercovitch, Courageous Literary Scholar, Dies at 81

American literature professor emeritus Sacvan Bercovitch is best remembered not only as a revolutionary in his field, but for his warm and approachable character as well. Rafia Zafar, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, described walking along Cambridge Common and talking with Bercovitch as "one of the highlights of my intellectual life.”

Bercovitch, a leader in the field of American studies, died of cancer on Dec. 9. He was 81.

Bercovitch was born and raised in Montreal, Canada, but dedicated his research to the emerging field of American literature. During his five-decade career, Bercovitch specialized in early American works, focusing specifically in how values from New England Puritans are projected in the American identity, according to his curriculum vitae.

Bercovitch joined Harvard in 1983, taught in the English department and held a professorship of English and American Literature until 2000 and a professorship of American literature from 2000-2001, according to his CV. After his retirement, he c

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1Sacvan Bercovitch’s eight-volume Cambridge History of American Literature is now complete: this is volume three, but the last in print. Originally conceived in the early nineties, the project has been the work of “a new generation of Americanists who have redrawn the boundaries of the field.” The use of “Americanist” here signals the manner in which those boundaries have been “redrawn.” Clearly, the History is not meant to be the work of stuffy (old) professors of literature who focus narrowly on the works themselves. Rather, the four essays in this volume, some of them book-length, examine the contexts in which American prose writing was produced between 1860 and 1920. In fact, the student attempting to understand such mundane literary categories as “Naturalism” or even historical categories such as the “Gilded Age” will be hard put to find any in-depth discussion. (The “Gilded Age,” for example, although referred to repeatedly in the first of the four essays, does not appear in the index.)

2Plurality, flexibility and diversity are the watchwords of this volume as well

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Sacvan Bercovitch

Sacvan Bercovitch, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Emeritus, and the foremost Americanist of his generation, was born in Montreal, the third child of Ukrainian Jewish parents, the painter Alexander Bercovitch and the radical Yiddishist Bryna Avrutik, who named him after Sacco and Vanzetti. He and his two sisters Sara (renamed Sylvia) and Ninel (Lenin spelled backwards) grew up in poverty, and Saki spent much of his childhood in foster homes, reaching higher education only through a circuitous route that included brief episodes at the New School for Social Research and at Reed College and work as a dairy farmer in an Israeli kibbutz, where he met his first wife, Gila (Hannah Malmquist).

Back in Montreal, he worked in Steinberg’s grocery store, whose manager encouraged him to continue his education. He went to night school and received his B.A. from Sir George Williams College when he was 27, then entered graduate school at Claremont and was awarded the Ph.D. in 1965, with a dissertation on Cotton Mather. Various teaching appointments fo