Puritan Jeremiad and American Myth: Sacvan Bercovitch’s Study in the Puritan Rhetoric and Imagination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sacvan Bercovitch is the most influential and prominent Americanist and literary and cultural critic after Perry Miller. In a close textual reading of classic Puritan texts, Bercovitch concludes that the major legacy of Puritan New England is not religious, or moral, or institutional, but in the realm of rhetoric. Rhetoric for Bercovitch is more than verbal ornamentation. It is a set of aesthetic devices that constitute a particular structure of perception, a particular pattern of thought and mode of expression. Bercovitch tries to grasp the imaginative structure and symbolic pattern of American thought underlying in rhetorical devices and believes that the Puritan rhetoric is the primary force that drives and shapes the American imagination. Bercovitch analyzes the Puritan jeremiad, a particular Puritan literary mode, to be a case of his study in the Puritan rhetoric. By the rhetorical device of typology, the Puritans identified America as the new promised land foretold in Scripture. Their migration to New England was a flight from another Babylon or Egypt; their conflicts with the Indians were foreshadowed by Joshua’s conquest of Cannan; and New England would in due time be the site of new Jerusalem. Considered as “a kind of imperialism by interpretation” by Bercovtich, the Puritan typology enables the immigrants to usurp the very meaning of the story of the ancient Jews. The Puritan jeremiad survives the decline of Puritanism and persists throughout the 18th and 19th century in all forms of the literature. It bespeaks an “ideological consensus” and helps sustain the myth of America through three hundred years of turbulence and change in American history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".