Randall Fuller
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195313925
- eISBN:
- 9780199787753
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313925.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines the construction of Emerson by Sacvan Bercovitch and the New Americanists. Focusing on the so-called subversion-containment model of the New Historicism, it reveals how ...
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This chapter examines the construction of Emerson by Sacvan Bercovitch and the New Americanists. Focusing on the so-called subversion-containment model of the New Historicism, it reveals how Bercovitch's application of this model to Emerson grew out of his own unusual circumstances as a Canadian Jew who own gradually migrated to American Studies.Less
This chapter examines the construction of Emerson by Sacvan Bercovitch and the New Americanists. Focusing on the so-called subversion-containment model of the New Historicism, it reveals how Bercovitch's application of this model to Emerson grew out of his own unusual circumstances as a Canadian Jew who own gradually migrated to American Studies.
Randall Fuller
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195313925
- eISBN:
- 9780199787753
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313925.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century ...
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The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. It examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. Emerging from this research is an in-depth account of Emerson's cultural construction as well as an institutional history of American literary studies in the 20th century. This book is also a fine-grained study of how the relationship between a scholar's individual perspective and prevailing cultural conditions merge together to impel critics to redirect the course of a present moment — often experienced as disappointing and unfulfilled — toward a desired future. When an engaged but theoretical mind meets with an impassive history, the response that follows, for some of our most imaginative and brilliant critics, has led, often and suggestively, to a turn toward Emerson.Less
The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. It examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. Emerging from this research is an in-depth account of Emerson's cultural construction as well as an institutional history of American literary studies in the 20th century. This book is also a fine-grained study of how the relationship between a scholar's individual perspective and prevailing cultural conditions merge together to impel critics to redirect the course of a present moment — often experienced as disappointing and unfulfilled — toward a desired future. When an engaged but theoretical mind meets with an impassive history, the response that follows, for some of our most imaginative and brilliant critics, has led, often and suggestively, to a turn toward Emerson.
Jonathon S. Kahn
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195307894
- eISBN:
- 9780199867516
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195307894.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
Sacvan Bercovitch's influential account of the American Jeremiad swallows the African American jeremiad whole. This chapter argues that Du Bois's African American jeremiads—in their conception of ...
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Sacvan Bercovitch's influential account of the American Jeremiad swallows the African American jeremiad whole. This chapter argues that Du Bois's African American jeremiads—in their conception of America without divine guarantee and riven with dissent, and of African Americans as a distinctly chosen people within America at large—represent a swerve from the Puritan form. First, Du Bois's jeremiads try to imagine a new type of America, a pluralistic democratic America that does not suppress dissent or its fraught history. Du Bois's jeremiads reject the idea of America's divine guarantee, as they reject a steadfast optimism and unshakeable faith in the American experience. The second critical way Du Bois's jeremiads disrupt Bercovitch's norm is in the way he uses them to establish and consolidate what Du Bois calls “A Negro Nation Within the Nation.” Du Bois does not mean by “nation” a separate political entity of African Americans, but a type of cultural, political, and social solidarity within America. For Du Bois, this emphasis on the integrity of black American culture represents a form of black nationalism that extends itself toward a larger pluralistic America.Less
Sacvan Bercovitch's influential account of the American Jeremiad swallows the African American jeremiad whole. This chapter argues that Du Bois's African American jeremiads—in their conception of America without divine guarantee and riven with dissent, and of African Americans as a distinctly chosen people within America at large—represent a swerve from the Puritan form. First, Du Bois's jeremiads try to imagine a new type of America, a pluralistic democratic America that does not suppress dissent or its fraught history. Du Bois's jeremiads reject the idea of America's divine guarantee, as they reject a steadfast optimism and unshakeable faith in the American experience. The second critical way Du Bois's jeremiads disrupt Bercovitch's norm is in the way he uses them to establish and consolidate what Du Bois calls “A Negro Nation Within the Nation.” Du Bois does not mean by “nation” a separate political entity of African Americans, but a type of cultural, political, and social solidarity within America. For Du Bois, this emphasis on the integrity of black American culture represents a form of black nationalism that extends itself toward a larger pluralistic America.
