Institutions, the Literary Canon, and a “Chronic Outsider”: The Example of Sacvan Bercovitch and the Cambridge History of American Literature

The essay draws a parallel between the cultural view of the German Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin and the critical stance of the Russian Jewish Canadian and then U.S. scholar Sacvan Bercovitch. With Bercovitch’s “cross-cultural variation” of Benjamin’s vision in mind and his critique of oppositionalism in particular, the essay builds upon Benjamin’s critique of empathy and then turns to Bercovitch’s mediation between empathy and horror – a critical position that sheds light on the latter’s crucial distinction and integration of the aesthetic and cognitive modes of criticism. This distinction/integration, as formulated and variously reiterated in some of Bercovitch’s theoretical essays of the mid 1980s, may be said to have given a foundation and a direction to the whole project of the new Cambridge History of American Literature – a project that began to get underway at Harvard, along with a concomitant and at times misleading and harshly debated reflection on the literary canon, from 1985 onward.