Berkovich, Sequen

Berkovich was born in Montreal, Quebec, and his name was made up of two names of anarchists: Sacco and Vanzetti, who were executed six years before his birth. The son of the Russian-Canadian artist Alexander Zeylikovich Berkovich (1891-1951) and Bryna Avrutik (1894-1956), originally from Kherson . Sister - artist Sylvia Erie (born 1923).

He received a bachelor's degree in humanities from Sir George Williams College, currently Concordia University (1958) and a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate School, now Claremont Graduate University (1965). (Since then, he received honorary degrees from both institutions: the lowest degree at Concordia in 1993 and the highest degree at Clermont in 2005).

Berkovich taught at Brandeis, University of California at San Diego, Princeton, and from 1970 to 1984 at Columbia University. From 1984 until his retirement in 2001, he taught at Harvard, where he held the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature (formerly held by Perry Miller). He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986. Berkovich also participated as a visiting teacher in many academic programs, including: the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth, the Bread Loaf School of English, Tel-Aviv University, the University of Rome, the École des Hautes Études in Paris, the Chinese Academy of Social Studies in Beijing, the Kyoto University Seminar in Japan, and the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He received academic honors for outstanding achievements in Early American Literature (2002), the Jay B. Hubbell Award for Excellence in American Literature (2004), and the Bode-Pearson Award for Excellence in American Studies (2007) )

Early work

Berkovich’s early books, The Puritan Origins of the American Self and American Jeremiad (along with his edited collections of typology and American Puritan imagination) provided a new interpretation of the structure of expression and feeling, as set out in a written work in Puritan New England. They offered:

1. the importance of biblical typology in Puritan New England thought;
2. the centrality of imagination in the works of New England Puritans;
3. correlation between imagination, religious conviction, as well as with the cultural and historical context;
4. the centrality of the text in the process of community self-determination, from a colony in a province to national statehood, from the Puritan use of scripture to the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Epistle, as well as within the framework of the national literary tradition; and from all these four points of view,
5. an understanding of the origins in New England of Puritanism of a peculiar way of expression and belief, which is the result of an "American" identity.

Berkovich's work at this time was criticized with a view of the spiritual and moral value of the Puritans. This points to a central aspect of his approach: the Puritan heritage as a rhetorical model of cultural continuity. He saw the Puritan “commission” as a proto-capitalist enterprise that offered the only convincing rationale for the modern community to expand into a large modern nation. What made him attractive from the start was not only his religious emphasis; it was the rhetoric through which persistent (since they adapt remarkably flexible) religious forms of influence of the secular concept of Puritans "of their New World mission. While other colonists in New France, New Spain, New Amsterdam understood themselves to be emissaries of the European empire, Puritans New England was rejected by the “old world.” Instead, they concentrated their imperial enterprise on the meaning that they read in their New World: “America,” as the new promised land that should speak of the promised land of the new modern Over the next two centuries, their vision was revealed in sacred secular symbolism, one that (changed forms to accommodate time changes) fueled the rhetoric of a new identity, the United States of America, as "America."

Late work

Thanks to his study of the expressive culture of Puritan New England, Berkovich moved forward, in the 19th and 20th centuries, to describe a peculiar nationalist ideology, with the participation of the distinctive strategy of liberal culture. This aspiration led to the main books of the nineties, The Scarlet Letter Bureau and The Rites of Assent (as well as his edited collections on the restoration of American History of Literature and Ideology and Classical American Literature), which in fact “completed the writing of the History of American Liberal Culture, begun in a previous work - this is a story that defines the method of provocation, in the United States, acts of the destruction of dissent put at the service of the vision of consensus. " To a greater extent, Berkovich argued that it is the strategy of American pluralism that causes political dissent, intellectual, aesthetic and scientific dissent, such as utopia (progress) and dystopia (catastrophe) - in order to orient it in confirmation of American ideals. The argument provoked controversy on the right and left sides. On the right, he condemned as a central figure the generation of upstarts of the New Americans: on the left, he was noted as a consensus historian who supported the idea of ​​American exclusivity. Partly in response to his critics, Berkovich has a qualified analysis in a series of his essays, recognition of the regime of the main resistance of ideology within democratic liberalism; in detail the tremendous exciting power of American ideals, economic and aesthetic; insisting on the constant power of America’s rhetoric to recruit utopia itself as a bastion of culture. In 2004, Berkovich completed a 20-year project as the editor-in-chief of the multivolume Cambridge History of American Literature, which was titled “Without a doubt, and without a serious competitor, the scientific history of our generation.”