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Though my interest in this subject arises somewhat obliquely to present work-in-progress, it has nevertheless become a matters of central concern to me. Perhaps it will help if I begin by filling in some preliminary contextual blanks as succinctly as possible: I am at work on a book about three contemporary Jewish-American critics and theorists of American literature, Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, and Sacvan Bercovitch, wherein I treat their intellectual and scholarly projects in light of the fact that they are all second-generation immigrant sons whose work reveals the aspirations and anxieties of on-going attempts to locate themselves within their adoptive culture. Their readings and theories, I claim, can be viewed as tactics of integration, indeed, as complex transferential strategies, part of the attempt—still complex and ambivalent in their generation, their manifest success stories notwithstanding—to find a place and a home in America.
No cultural project of this kind is ever a simple one, or one for which external criteria are a sufficient measure; moreover, the mere application of such overused shorthand sociological terms as “assimilation,” and “acculturation,” or, for that matter, psychological ones like “adjustment” and “adaptation,” do not provide anything like a complete account of such processes. The relations of these newcomers to the dominant American culture and their intellectual attitudes toward it are always at least two-fold, the trick being not merely to find a place within the new world, but to do so by way of a critical perspective and without entirely surrendering the specific identities associated with the old. These have been central concerns of all immigrant communities in America, since at least as far back as the Puritans, and it is a dynamic, one might add, introduced to the incipient modern Western