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and Marx, the method of interpretation has stressed tensions, dualisms,
antinomies. Novel and romance, nature and society, hope and memory,
mind and world, myth and experience, industrial and pastoral: these
have been the embracing terms of the typical dialectics perceived at the
heart of the literature. Bercovitch al
0
employs a dialectical mode, but
he virtually ignores the familiar terms in favor of a very unfamiliar
terminology of rhetorical or figurative analysis, and subordinates
dialectics, somewhat in the manner of the Puritan writers on whom he
bases his argument, for the construction of a holistic design. The
design is adumbrated in the concluding chapter as "the myth of
America." The process of construction, which takes up the bulk of the
book, is a lavishly detailed and meticulou argument concerning
Puritan hermeneutics, that is, the way in which the seventeenth–
century New England orthodoxy read and wrote its texts. An ingenious
construction itself, virtually an imitation in form of the structure of
thought it elucidates, the book proceeds from a consideration of a
single text from Cotton Mather's
Magnalia Christi Americana,
or
rather the conjunction in the title of Mather's brief life of John
Winthrop of two terms: Nehemias Americanus (the American Nehem–
iah). With awesome erudition and unmistakable authority, Bercovitch
displays his own remarkable hermeneutical powers in demonstrating
that the yoked-together words are pregnant with a " omprehensive
historical design" of "astonishing breadth and coherence."
Apart from Perry Miller's intellectual histories, none of the critics
in the recent past has thought to locate the origins of a unique
Americanness in the genera ll y forbidding literature of tracts and
sermons and histories of seventeenth-century New England; an excep–
tion is Charles Feidelson, who devotes a -good part of one chapter in
Symbolism and American Literature
(1953) to the background of the
American symbolist tradition in Puritan methodology.
In
this ense
and in several others, Bercovitch's work mo t re embles Feidelson's.
Both are concerned with the development of an intellectual method
from Puritanism to romanticism, and both are concerned with a kind
of self-consciousness and intellectualism that seems a special mark of
the Puritan bequest to American literary culture. Although they differ
in other quite fundamental ways which it would be inappropriate to
raise here, the most notable difference lies in their subject matter:
Feidelson is concerned with concepts and procedures of art, whi le
Bercovitch, more sweeping in the field he commands, investigates the
centrality of a unique idea of America itself. The uniqueness of his
own enterprise, and this is not the least of what is praiseworthy about
