ABSTRACT

Sacvan Bercovitch, The Office of the Scarlet Letter, he found the connection between liberal and Puritan hermeneutics his own richest access to the ironies of American history. Bercovitch, Office, that has persisted from the Puritans until now; and if that relation is constitutive of the 'American ideology'; then that attack on the 'American ideology' which compromised in terrible ways the 'relation between pluralism and consent', was also an attack on the ironic nature of that relation. Bercovitch ends The Office of the Scarlet Letter with Kafka's parable of the leopards in the temple and with Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'Mayflower-Eagle'. He begins The Rites of Assent with Montreal's Der Keneder Odler and with Kafka's parable of the dog who for the first time hears the music of dogs, 'a great parable of interpretation as mystification'. Traditionally the paradox is more closely associated with the prophetic or meditative, while the list is more legalistic.