Word: bercovitch
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...purchased this day's issue of your paper for one of the front-page stories and read with interest "From Radicalism to Puritanism, Sacvan Bercovitch Searches On." I quote: "Like the other radicals of the 1920s, she was riled by the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the famous anarchists who were hanged in Boston for treason during the Red Scare...
Crowded together, such formulations make this book difficult, while their frequent repetition--as though Bercovitch were afraid his ideas might be lost under the flood of his verbiage--makes it sometimes tedious, despite the originality of its thesis...
Unfortunately, Bercovitch's own rhetorical strategy is far less compelling. The basic plan of his book--which begins with a close textual analysis of Mather's study of Winthrop and expands into an examination of its cultural context and implications as a testament to American identity--is potentially workable, even exciting. What mars its execution, however, is Bercovitch's overfondness for long, convoluted sentences punctuated with Latin expressions, his heavy use of quotations, and the slowness with which he moves from concept to concept. Together these flaws give his prose a muddy, static quality...
...line with his concern with symbolism, many of Bercovitch's sentences read like a long string of identifications...
Miller and his successors modified earlier views of the Puritans as anti-egalitarian, hypocritical killjoys by examining more closely the role their religion played in their lives. Because he focuses on the language of that religion alone, Bercovitch can go even farther and assess the Puritan achievement in a frankly celebratory vein. "History betrayed them, we know," he writes. "That they persisted nonetheless requires us, I believe, to redefine their achievement in a positive way." In labeling Cotton Mather as the keeper of the American dream, Bercovitch writes that "he rescued the errand by appropriating it to himself." Although...