37 Facts About Steven Marcus

Steven Paul Marcus was an American academic and literary critic who published influential psychoanalytic analyses of the novels of Charles Dickens and Victorian pornography.

Steven Marcus was George Delacorte Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Columbia University.

Steven Marcus was born in New York City, the son of Nathan and Adeline Muriel Marcus.

Steven Marcus's grandparents were emigrants from the countryside near Vilnius.

Only ten months after Steven was born in 1928, the stock market crashed, leaving his father unemployed for six years and causing the family to slide into poverty.

Steven Marcus's sister, Debora, was born in 1936, and the family moved to a lower-class neighborhood in the Bronx called Highbridge, near Yankee Stadium, which was populated by Irish, Italian, and Jewish families.

Steven Marcus attended William Howard Taft and De Witt Clinton High School and graduated at the age of fifteen in 1944, against the backdrop of World War II.

Steven Marcus was admitted with full scholarships to both Columbia University and Harvard University, but because his family could not afford to pay for room and board at Harvard, he attended Columbia, where he studied under Lionel Trilling.

Steven Marcus was then appointed to a two-year lectureship at Baruch College, and married his first wife.

Steven Marcus had brief stints at the University of North Carolina and the University of Southern California.

Immediately after earning his doctorate, Steven Marcus was appointed to an assistant professorship at Columbia as a faculty colleague of Lionel Trilling.

Steven Marcus finalized his divorce from his first wife, Algene Ballif Steven Marcus, in 1965.

Steven Marcus had been introduced to German sociologist Gertrud Lenzer in 1962, who had recently emigrated from Munich after taking her PhD from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat.

Steven Marcus was one of six faculty signatories at Columbia in 1967 that pledged to make churches and synagogues refuges for conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War.

Steven Marcus was flown in from New York to offer testimony as an expert defense witness.

The prosecution accused Steven Marcus of harboring prurient motives for analyzing pornography in The Other Victorians.

Steven Marcus was a founding organizer of the National Humanities Center and was appointed the chairman of the executive committee board directors from 1976 to 1980.

Steven Marcus later served as a fellow between 1980 and 1982 and later remained active in the center as a trustee.

In 1988, paranoid schizophrenic Daniel L Price heard Marcus give a lecture on one of Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems that addressed the perils of solitude and isolation, and became convinced that Marcus and Joyce Carol Oates were trying to find him a girlfriend.

In 1993, the President of Columbia University, George Erik Rupp, in an effort to consolidate sprawling arts and sciences departments, abruptly fired several deans, including Jack Greenberg and Roger Bagnall, without consultation with faculty, and appointed Steven Marcus to serve as both dean of the college and vice president for arts and sciences.

Steven Marcus cited the example of a professor of anthropology denouncing the candy Mars Bars as a confectionery embodiment of America's indefensible impulse to colonize everything, including extraterrestrial planetary space.

Steven Marcus died at the age of 89 as a result of cardiac arrest.

Steven Marcus's arguments would prove exceptionally influential, including claims that the master-concept of Nicholas Nickleby was a hostility to "prudence"; that the abstract principle governing Dombey and Son was resistance to change and temporal decay; that Sam Weller cagily subverts the idealizing morality of Mr Pickwick; and that Oliver Twist makes its most incisive political indictments through "satiric innocence", or a position of non-partisan humanity.

Steven Marcus concludes that pornography is distinct from literature in its singular goal of arousal, its repetitions without fulfillment, and its effort to move beyond language and reality.

Diane Darrow found fault with Steven Marcus's assumption that My Secret Life was an authentic biography, and in the same vein William Shaefer noted that Steven Marcus "treats the book as if it were a verified case history, and thus his sober Freudian analysis at times becomes almost ludicrous".

Mike Spilka cautioned that Steven Marcus's conclusions are drawn from a very small sampling of texts, which leads him overestimate the anxiety around depletion of the seminal economy.

Steven Marcus had earlier characterized Foucault's scholarship as "impenetrable" on account of "the author's arrogance, carelessness, and imprecision".

Similarly, though Steven Marcus characterized pornography as apolitical and ahistorical fantasy, Joudrey has cited evidence from the underground Victorian magazine The Pearl of extensive political commentary, including references to the Reform Bills and Contagious Diseases Acts and allusions to many controversial public figures, such as Annie Besant, Charles Spurgeon, Wilfrid Lawson, Newman Hall, Edmund Burke, William Gladstone, and Robert Peel.

Steven Marcus takes the inadequacy of previous critical approaches as the impetus for his project about the life of Friedrich Engels in Manchester.

Pigenholed as a monument to socialism, an interpretation of Industrial Revolution, or a historical document of urban life, Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England has been widely misunderstood, Steven Marcus argues, because the brutal demoralization and dehumanization that it documented beggared all description, and therefore a literary approach that takes into account the inadequacies and displacements of language is crucial to understanding it.

Nonetheless, Steven Marcus argues that Engels never could overcome his middle-class feelings of superiority over his romantic partner, Mary Burns, despite his enduring love for her.

Steven Marcus then turns to comparing Engels's analysis of Manchester to those of major literary observers, including Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Edwin Chadwick, and French economist Leon Faucher.

Steven Marcus argues that Engels succeeds along with Dickens not because they get their data right or wrong, but because they echo the deepest unconscious contradictions of men.

Alfred Jenkin wondered whether the frequent errors of fact about Manchester implied that Steven Marcus had never set foot in the city.

Walter faulted Steven Marcus's wandering and elliptical style of analysis, characterizing his work as "excruciatingly mannered" and "inconclusive".

Revisiting his interpretation of The Pickwick Papers from his first book, Steven Marcus argues that Dickens's style begins in a mode of "free, wild, inventive doodling" but gathers design and purpose as Pickwick encounters the hard structures of law, property, and money.

On representation in George Eliot's fiction, Steven Marcus argues that her narrative histories mimic nineteenth-century abstract systems of explanation while militating against acknowledgment of their artificial constructedness, thereby creating a stable history that seems to rest on nature, rather than linguistic invention.