"I think that I prefer undergraduate teaching and I would insist on it for myself," said the Canadian-born Bercovich.

Bercovich said that money had nothing to do with his decision, which he said was solely based on his positive feelings about Harvard

One Harvard English professor interviewed yesterday said that the Bercovich appointment was part of an ongoing transition in the Department to build a new generation of scholars.

Morton W. Bloomfield, Porter Professor of English, cited the recent appointments of Marjorie Garber, professor of English, Barbara Lewalski, professor of History and Literature; and Helen Vendler, visiting professor of English and American Literature, along with the tenuring of Bercovich.

"Yale is going on the way down now, and we're going up," said Bloomfield, who is retiring this year along with Aaron. He said there are still appointments to be made in Medieval and Victorian literature, but that, "In five to six years, the whole department is going to be on the way up."

Bloomfield added that Bercovich "has just revolutionized the field of American literature." Bloomfield cited in particular the Columbia scholar's work in realizing the importance of Puritan typology, that is, the way those early settlers felt they were "fulfilling the Biblical pattern."

Bercovich was born on Montreal in 1933 and attended high school there, "the first in his family" to do so, he said After high school, he moved to Israel, where he lived on a Kibbutz for several years, before returning to the United States for further education.

He attended, by night, Sir George Williams College in Montreal, graduating in 1961. He then received his doctorate in 1965 from Claremont University in California in 1965.

Though Bercovich has never lived in Boston, his arrival at Harvard in the fall will in a strange way be kind of a homecoming. His "idealistic" mother, he said, named him after Sacco and Vanzetti, the famous anarchists who were executed for treason in Boston during the "red scare" of the 1920s. "In a way," Bercovich chuckled, "I'll be returning to the scene of the crime.