Recently in CHAL Category

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.

Robert Ferguson (Columbia University) wrote to me in an e-mail that the format for tonight's MLA roundtable "American Literary Historiography, Then and Now," which I am chairing, was not promising, given that we had seven people slotted to speak and then field questions -- and only 1 hour and 15 minutes to do it in. in addition to maintaining a strict time limit on each speaker's position statement (5 minutes, plus 1 minute to sum up), I'm going to forego making a statement myself, limiting myself to introducing my fellow participants -- Morris Dickstein (CUNY Grad Center); Robert A. Ferguson (Columbia University); Gerald Graff (University of Illinois, Chicago); Walter Benn Michaels, (University of Illinois, Chicago); Shira Wolosky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem); and Rafia Zafar (Washington University) -- and letting the audience know that I asked each participant to speak about one or more of the following questions: 1) What did you feel was the most pressing problem for the literary historian when you wrote your contribution to the Cambridge History of American Literature; 2) What do you feel will be the most pressing problem for the next set of literary historians who tackle your period or field? 3) What do you think the Cambridge History of American Literature as a whole has accomplished?

Were I myself to answer those three questions, I'd probably say something like this: