Transferring to America: Jewish Interpretations of American Dreams

This book uses recent psychoanalytic theory to analyze the work of three contemporary scholars--Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, and Sacvan Bercovitch--while viewing their work as expressing Jewish immigrant desires for integration into American culture. This book primarily concerns the work of three prominent literary scholars, Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, and Sacvan Bercovitch, treating them as second-generation immigrant Jewish Americans. With at least two meanings of “transferring” in mind, the title alludes both to the historical, socio-cultural actualities of immigrancy, and to the psychoanalytic model used to describe the relations between these readers and the American texts they interpret. The central claim is that the theories and critical practices of Bercovitch, Bloom, and Cavell can be considered as the tools and tactics of an ambivalent, not yet fully realized desire for integration into America. Their cultural identity as members of the Jewish minority in America can thus still be seen to operate as a compelling source of anxiety and motivation.