Steven Marcus
Steven Marcus | |
---|---|
Born | New York City | December 13, 1928
Died | April 25, 2018 Literary Critic, Professor | (aged 89)
Notable work | The Other Victorians (1966) |
Main interests | Literary criticism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, pornography |
Notable ideas | Pornotopia |
Steven Paul Marcus (December 13, 1928 – April 25, 2018) was an American academic and literary critic who published influential psychoanalytic analyses of the novels of Charles Dickens and Victorian pornography. He was George Delacorte Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Columbia University.
Biography
Early life
Steven Marcus was born in New York City, the son of Nathan and Adeline Muriel (née Gordon) Marcus. His grandparents were emigrants from the countryside near
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. He 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. Because of his family's economic precariousness, Marcus continued to live at home and carry his lunch to school in a paper bag.[2]: 247 Upon graduation, Marcus immediately enrolled in graduate school at Columbia, writing his master's thesis on Henry James under the guidance of F. W. Dupee.[2]: 247 After taking his master's degree in 1949, he took an instructorship at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he lived on a pig farm. Marcus was then appointed to a two-year lectureship at Baruch College, and married his first wife.[2]: 249 Marcus also had brief stints at the University of North Carolina and the University of Southern California.[4]
In 1952, he earned a fellowship to
Career
Immediately after earning his doctorate, Marcus was appointed to an assistant professorship at Columbia as a faculty colleague of Lionel Trilling. The two collaborated to co-edit an abridgment of
Marcus finalized his divorce from his first wife, Algene Ballif Marcus, in 1965.
Marcus was one of six faculty signatories at Columbia in 1967 that pledged to make churches and synagogues refuges for conscientious objectors to the
In 1969, for reprinting the anonymous memoir
Marcus was a founding organizer of the National Humanities Center[15] and was appointed the chairman of the executive committee board directors from 1976 to 1980. He later served as a fellow between 1980 and 1982 and later remained active in the center as a trustee.[16]
After three years of intensive study, Marcus released the so-called "Marcus Report" as head of the Presidential Commission on Academic Priorities in the Arts and Sciences. The 264-page report was unusually blunt in analyzing the decline in the quality of education offered by Columbia. Its core recommendation was new hiring in the hard sciences and elimination of twelve humanities faculty positions through attrition.[17] A professor of anthropology described the report as "absolutely a mess".[18]
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. Price inundated Marcus with messages on his answering machine and mailed Marcus a suicide note. In response, Marcus, along with Edward Said, helped to persuade Price to take psychiatric medication by assuring him he was not under surveillance. Price later sent death threats to Marcus and Said, accusing them of "soul murder", and by 1994, Marcus reported that Price had on two occasions used a baseball bat to shatter windows at the English Department before being arrested.[19][20]
In 1993, the President of Columbia University,
In a special issue of the Partisan Review in 1993, Marcus characterized political correctness as a new incarnation of the "soft totalitarianism" described by George Orwell, whereby orthodoxies "muzzle, stifle, or suppress dissent, and create fear and anxiety in those whose thinking deviates from their prescriptions". In Marcus's account, adherents of political correctness share a number of common features, including a shared sense of victimhood, resentment towards humor, jokes, and comedy, and malice couched in euphemisms. 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.[31]
Marcus died at the age of 89 as a result of cardiac arrest.[32]
Major works
Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey
Marcus's first scholarly monograph, From Pickwick to Dombey, used psychoanalytic and mythological frameworks to analyze seven of Dickens's then neglected early novels. 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. Though immediately recognized as an eminent work of Dickens criticism, From Pickwick to Dombey was widely criticized for an over-reliance on Freudian concepts, a tendency that academic reviewers called "facile",[33] "deeply flawed",[34] and, according to Barbara Hardy, "rigidly orthodox" and "tactless".[35] The New York Times review praised Marcus for connecting the "glaring faults of staginess and sentimentality" in Dickens's fiction to the "deep wounds in his personal life",[36] though The Times mocked Marcus for using abstruse and stilted diction such as "hypnagogic phenomenon".[37]
The Other Victorians
Using a psychoanalytic lexicon developed by Sigmund Freud, The Other Victorians[38] draws on archival materials from the Kinsey Institute to analyze sexual subcultures in nineteenth-century Britain. Marcus culls the official views of Victorian society from physician William Acton, whose writings anxiously deny the existence of childhood sexuality even as they make elaborate recommendations to suppress it.[38]: 15 Acton’s later writings about prostitution reveal a more humanizing approach designed to alleviate stigma and reintegrate women into other professions.[38]: 6 Marcus also documents the widespread legal and medical panic over masturbation, which was strongly correlated with mental alienation and insanity. Semen was regarded as a finite commodity whose depletion through onanism or wet dreams, known as "spermatorrhoea", was believed to lead to enervation, disease, and eventually death.[38]: 27 Marcus contrasts these official views with the clandestine circulation of pornography, records of which were meticulously preserved by Henry Spencer Ashbee’s elaborately annotated indices.[38]: 34
The Other Victorians also provided the first extensive study of the anonymous eleven-volume pornographic memoir
Within weeks of appearing in Britain in 1966, The Other Victorians sailed past Nancy Mitford's biography of Louis XIV to top the national bestseller list.[39]
The initial reception of The Other Victorians was mixed. Diane Darrow found fault with Marcus’s assumption that My Secret Life was an authentic biography,[40] and in the same vein William Shaefer noted that Marcus "treats the book as if it were a verified case history, and thus his sober Freudian analysis at times becomes almost ludicrous".[41] Mike Spilka cautioned that Marcus's conclusions are drawn from a very small sampling of texts, which leads him overestimate the anxiety around depletion of the seminal economy.[42] Robert Philmus similarly expressed regret at Marcus’s "disinclination to assimilate a wider range of literary evidence and historical particulars".[43] In a lengthy review essay, historian Brian Harrison charged that Marcus's unitary ideal of "pornotopia" was based on too few texts; that he omitted a bibliography and references to My Secret Life; that his "research is not sufficiently extensive to bear the weight of his relatively ambitious conclusions"; and that his analysis contains "moralising passages which might well have been uttered by a nineteenth-century clergyman".[44] Meanwhile, in the popular press, a review in The Times described the subject matter as "ghastly stuff" and derided Marcus as "a student of smut who deserves to be admired as much for stamina as for integrity of purpose".[45] In a more laudatory assessment, The New York Times described the work as a "rigidly Freudian" but nonetheless "valuable and perceptive mining operation in Victoriana".[46] In his 2009 preface to the reissue of The Other Victorians, Marcus returned to a Freudian framework to analyze "residues of infantile and childhood sexuality" in contemporary sexual behavior, and observed that women's erotic lives continue to be understudied in the twenty-first century.[47]
Marcus's work set off a flurry of scholarship in nineteenth-century cultural studies, producing book-length works on sexuality, prostitution, masturbation, flagellation, sodomy, and masochism. Michel Foucault developed the most comprehensive challenge to the "repressive hypothesis" that in his view pervades Marcus's account of Victorian sexuality, signaling his challenge to Marcus by entitling Part 1 of his study, "We 'Other' Victorians".[48] Marcus had earlier characterized Foucault's scholarship as "impenetrable" on account of "the author’s arrogance, carelessness, and imprecision".[49] Andrew H. Miller, surveying the critical terrain of sexuality studies three decades later, described The Other Victorians as "the single most influential account of sexuality in Victorian Britain before the work of Foucault".[50]
More recently, Thomas Joudrey has challenged Marcus's concept of pornotopia, explaining: "Far from envisaging a world of endless potency and pleasure, Victorian pornography grapples with the terrifying prospects of bodily decay, suffering, and mortality, placing potency on a razor's edge." Joudrey cites examples of "impotence, syphilitic outbreaks, torn foreskins, severed rods, soiled cocks, and slack vaginas" to illustrate a pervasive pattern of failure and conflict that is fundamentally at odds with "utopian fantasies of purity and immortality".
Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class
Marcus takes the inadequacy of previous critical approaches as the impetus for his project about the life of
The first section pursues the question of why the bourgeois German son of a factory master would forsake his own class. Taking Eric Hobsbawm to task for ignoring psychoanalytic questions altogether, Marcus rejects the simplistic formula of an Oedipal turn on his father, but argues for a more subtle understanding of Engels as envisioning a proletarian fury transformed into consciousness, thereby synthesizing and resolving his admiration and resentment of his own father. Nonetheless, 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. 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 Léon Faucher. 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.
The academic reaction to Marcus's work on Engels generally faulted his biographical Freudian approach to material and historical processes. Myrna Chase judged that Marcus's "psychological analysis of Engels must be judged more humorous than profound".[53] Echoing Chase, John Lucas argues that Marcus's "psychoanalytic speculations" are entirely unhelpful and in some cases "plain silly", noting that whether Engels saw Thomas Carlyle as a father-figure is "not of the slightest importance". Lucas adds that Marcus's failure to take Elizabeth Gaskell's novels seriously prevents Marcus from seeing the limitations of Engels's perception of the working class. By using the worst examples of filth and poverty as archetypal, Marcus colludes with Engels in erasing the gradations of the working class and their efforts at cultural production.[54] Alfred Jenkin wondered whether the frequent errors of fact about Manchester implied that Marcus had never set foot in the city.[55] E. V. Walter faulted Marcus's wandering and elliptical style of analysis, characterizing his work as "excruciatingly mannered" and "inconclusive".[56] Nevertheless, The Times praised it as a "brilliant, if sometimes bejargoned, new book" that would reinvigorate interest in the work of Friedrich Engels.[57]
Representations
Representations collects a broad range of reviews and essays written between 1956 and 1974, organized around what Marcus terms "the imagination of society". Marcus uses this phrase to collapse the distinction between material actuality and formal representation: "The structures of literature refer to this real world, comment upon it, represent it by means of a written language that is part of it, and are hence themselves part of the same world that they refract and reconstitute imaginatively."
Revisiting his interpretation of The Pickwick Papers from his first book, 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, 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. Marcus then takes up Freudian concepts to suggest that Eliot's early fiction is a complex system of psychic defense mechanisms constructed to control three principle subjects: sexual passion, class conflict, and the unintelligibility of the world. He illustrates this process by showing that in Scenes of Clerical Life, Milly Barton suffers from a miscarriage, which Eliot obliquely represents, then dies from experiencing premature labor. Marcus takes this to imply that Milly died of her own sexual satisfaction in her marriage, engendering a profound and compelling mystery as to why a less-than-ordinary man could gratify an extraordinary woman.
Scholarly reviews of Representations praised Marcus's relentless interdisciplinary synthesis of literary, anthropological, and philosophical methods,[58] and commended Marcus's style for its "playfulness, wit, zest, and readability", in contrast to the "high seriousness and arch academicism of most criticism today".[59] A review in The New York Times praised the collection as "strong, deeply felt, and humane", but lamented that Marcus "always seems to doubt himself or to suspect himself of triviality when he allows his mind to run loose from the mind of society".[60]
Major publications
- Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (1961)
- Ernest Jones's The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1961), (co-editor, with Lionel Trilling)
- The Other Victorians (1966)
- Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (1974)
- Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (1975)
- Doing Good: The limits of benevolence (1978; contributor)
- Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis (1984)
External links
References
- ^ Steven Marcus (1928-2018)
- ^ a b c d e f Susanne Klingenstein. Enlarging America: The Cultural Work of Jewish Literary Scholars, 1930-1990. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998.
- ^ "Steven Marcus Obituary: Academic Once Dismissed as a 'Student of Smut' who Wrote an Influential Study of Pornography in 19th-Century England". The Times, May 14, 2018.
- ^ Halikman, Ruth. "Introducing the 'Troika': Columbia's New Leaders", Columbia Daily Spectator, July 7, 1993, p. 3.
- ^ Steven Marcus, "Tribute to William Phillips". Partisan Review 70.2 (2003): 205.
- ^ Marcus, Steven. "Lionel Trilling", The New York Times, February 8, 1976.
- ^ Heilbrun, Carolyn. When Men were the Only Models we Had, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, p. 54.
- ^ Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics, New York: Doubleday, 1970, xxvii.
- ^ "Obituary: Algene Ballif Marcus", Salt Lake Tribune, April 26, 2014.
- ^ Seth Koven, "The Marriage of Social Science and Literary Criticism in The Other Victorians". Victorian Studies 59.3 (2017): 477-89.
- ^ Jeffrey Arsham. "Six Professors Sign Petition Supporting War Resistors". Columbia Daily Spectator, October 4, 1967, p. 1.
- ^ F. W. Dupee and Steven Marcus, "Peace Action at Columbia", The New York Review of Books, June 4, 1970.
- ^ Thomas, Donald. "My Secret Life: The Trial at Leeds". Victorian Studies 12.4 (1969): 450.
- ^ Geoffrey Best, Donald Thomas, J. A. Banks, and Michael Irwin. "My Secret Life: Themes and Variations". Victorian Studies 13.2 (1969): 204-15.
- ^ Lou de Stefano. "Marcus to Head Committee Planning Humanities Center". Columbia Daily Spectator, February 14, 1974, p. 3.
- ^ "Fellows of the National Humanities Center, H-O". Fellows of the National Humanities Center. National Humanities Center, n.d. Web. 27 Sept. 2015. <"Archived copy". Archived from the original on June 18, 2013. Retrieved July 13, 2015.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)>. - ^ David Rosenberg, "A&S Panel Charts Slow Decline". Columbia Daily Spectator, January 22, 1980, p. 1.
- ^ David Rosenberg. "Few Complaints Greet Marcus Report on A&S". Columbia Daily Spectator, January 25, 1980, p. 3.
- William H. Honan. "Man Is Suspected of Harassing Columbia University Professors".The New York Times, November 2, 1994.
- ^ N. R. Kleinfield. "A Brilliant Student, A Path of Obsession. Inside the Mind Of a Stalker". The New York Times, August 6, 1995.
- ^ McCaughey, Robert A. Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754-2004. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 559.
- ^ Dillon, Sam. "New President of Columbia Reportedly Seeks Shake-up of Deans", The New York Times, June 4, 1993, B1.
- ^ Dillon, Sam. "Trustees Back Shift of Deans at Columbia", The New York Times, June 6, 1993, p. 37.
- ^ "New Dean Is Named At Columbia College", The New York Times, May 19, 1995.
- ^ Franklin, Danny. "In Defense of Dean Marcus". Columbia Daily Spectator, February 15, 1994, p. 3
- ^ "Past Difficulties Make 1994-95 a 'Test Year' for University President". Columbia Daily Spectator, September 8, 1994, p. 9.
- ^ Carmiel, Oshrat. "A&S Deans Neglect their Electronic Mail", Columbia Daily Spectator, February 18, 1994, p. 1.
- ^ "Marcus Reflects on Challenges Successor will Face", Columbia Daily Spectator, April 21, 1995, p. 1.
- ^ Jorgensen, Andrew. "A Phallus in 208 Hamilton Hall", Columbia Daily Spectator, December 2, 1993, p. 3.
- ^ "Thirteen Administrators Resign", Columbia Daily Spectator, September 8, 1994, p. 6.
- ^ Marcus, Steven. "Soft Totalitarianism", The Partisan Review, 60.4 (1993): 630–638.
- ^ Roberts, Sam. "Steven Marcus, Columbia Scholar and Literary Critics, Dies at 89". The New York Times, April 30, 2018.
- ^ Edgar Johnson, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 20.4 (1966): 399.
- ^ Harry Stone, "Critic of the Hour", Kenyon Review 27.3 (1965): 518.
- ^ Barbara Hardy, Victorian Studies 9.3 (1966): 207.
- ^ Fraser, G.S. "Bolts and Flashes of Genius", The New York Times, May 16, 1965, BR5.
- ^ "Letters by Boz", The Times, February 4, 1965.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Steven Marcus. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. New York: Basic Books, 1966.
- ^ "Professor Steven Marcus, Professor of Victorian Pornography, Obituary". The Daily Telegraph, May 1, 2018.
- ^ Diane Darrow. The Kenyon Review 28.5 (1966): 708.
- ^ William D. Shaefer. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 21.4 (1967): 385.
- ^ Mike Stilka. Victorian Studies 10.3 (1967): 294.
- ^ Robert M. Philmus. Criticism 10.1 (1968): 92.
- ^ Harrison, Brian. "Underneath the Victorians", Victorian Studies 10.3 (1967): 248, 249, 252, 249.
- ^ Hannah, Pierce. "Pornotopia", The Times, January 19, 1967.
- ^ Janeyway, Elizabeth. "Two Faces of an Era", The New York Times, August 4, 1966.
- ^ Marcus, Steven. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009.
- ^ Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon, 1979.
- ^ Marcus, Steven. "In Praise of Folly", The New York Review of Books, November 17, 1966.
- ^ Miller, Andrew H. "Introduction", in Sexualities in Victorian Britain, ed. Andrew H. Miller and James Eli-Adams. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996, p. 2.
- ^ Joudrey, Thomas J. "Penetrating Boundaries: An Ethics of Anti-Perfectionism in Victorian Pornography". Victorian Studies 57.3 (2015): 423-32.
- ^ Joudrey, Thomas J. "Against Communal Nostalgia: Reconstructing Sociality in the Pornographic Ballad", Victorian Poetry 54.4 (2017): 516.
- ^ Chase, Myrna. Newsletter: European Labor and Working Class History 7 (1975): 36–38.
- ^ Lucas, John. Victorian Studies 18.4 (1975): 461–472.
- ^ Alfred Jenkin. Science and Society 40.1 (1976): 108–111.
- ^ Walter, E.V. American Political Science Review 70.4 (1976): 1283.
- ^ Ratcliffe, Michael. "News from Nowhere", The Times, October 3, 1974.
- ^ Briggs, Asa. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 32.1 (1977): 118–121.
- ^ Core, George. "Arnold, Eliot, and the Critical Performance Today", The Sewanee Review 85.4 (1977): 682–686.
- ^ Donoghue, Denis. "Representation", The New York Times, March 1976, p. 210.