Sacvan Bercovitch and American Studies
Last night, in Philadelphia, I watched my mentor, Sacvan Bercovitch, receive the American Studies Association’s Carl Bode – Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement. It was my pleasure and my honor to have nominated Saki for the award and to have gathered supporting letters from colleagues and students.
In conferring the award, the prize committee’s chairperson, Gordon Hutner (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne), described Saki as “the presiding spirit, in many respects, of American Studies. Through his writings, his intellectual politics, his service to the Association, Professor Bercovitch has made an unparalleled set of distinguished contributions over the past thirty 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 in American literary study and indeed has played a central part in galvanizing the source of its interdisciplinary practice.”
Hutner noted that the American Studies Association is “infinitely more robust” than it was the last time it met in Philadelphia, in 1982 when Saki was president and suggested that this robustness may well be “the fruit of Sacvan Bercovitch’s labors.”
I didn’t know Saki then (we wouldn’t meet for another couple of years when he had relocated to Harvard), and it was a revelation for me to hear about the central role that he had played in setting the ASA back on course after a period during which it was foundering. I was struck by the fact that he was even more deserving of the Bode – Pearson prize than my letter of nomination had suggested.
What follows is the text of that letter. As a tribute it’s inadequate, but at least it achieved what it was intended to achieve.
