Familiarizing oneself with over ninety sources during the course of a summer is not that unique of a task.  Countless other PhD candidates have done it, researchers and reporters do it all the time, and many without the gift of a summer free from the demands of teaching.  But, it is an important and memorable task nonetheless, so why not document its progress?

My title attempts a play on words of Sacvan Bercovitch’s The American Jeremiad, the book my attention happens to be on today. Bercovitch analyzes rhetoric in order to find pervasive cultural themes: in the case of American Jeremiad, the sermons of Puritan ministers.  As he says in his preface, “The American jeremiad was a ritual designed to join social criticism to spiritual renewal, public to private identity, the shifting ‘signs of the time’ to certain traditional metaphors, themes, and symbols.”  (xi)  I am fully aware that I’m likely reading my life into my readings a bit too much at this point, but this sort of sounds like the myriad of tasks before a PhD student, does it not?  I’m trying to become familiar with trends in social criticism from various historical periods, leading toward a hoped-for renewal of my creative writing energies, resulting in work which may some day grant me the life of a scholar/academic whose private/public identity blurs in a constant, almost monomaniacal pursuit of cultural truths gleaned from American metaphors, themes, and symbols.  Well, a girl can dream anyway.

1) So, my entry for July 2, 2014 is The American Jeremiad, by Sacvan Bercovitch, originally published in 1978.  Bercovitch argues that the jeremiad was not only a lamentation for the lost achievement of the Puritan’s “errand” into wilderness, as explained by Perry Miller, but became over time a “ritual” that blurred the boundaries between sacred and secular, world and kingdom, helping Americans to imbue the nation and its activities with a kind of divine sanction long after the original religious context had been largely forgotten.  But be forewarned, if you’re looking for a “patricidal totem feast”, this book is not for you.  Bercovitch is much more interested in building on Miller’s earlier scholarship on the jeremiad than on committing intellectual patricide.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1978. The American Jermiad. Paperback. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1980.