December 13, 1928

Steven Marcus (December 13, 1928 to April 25, 2018) was a literary critic associated with Columbia University before and after his own graduate studies there. His obituary notes:

'Professor Steven Marcus,... was an American scholar best known for his classic bestselling study of 19th-century British pornography The Other Victorians (1964), in which he threw much new light on hitherto obscure and unmentionable aspects of Victorian life...'

This volume was criticized by some for the author's dependence on Freudian tropes. The measure of the intellect of  Steven Marcus was his conclusion elsewhere that the writing of Michel Foucault was too vague, a standard criticism of post modernism by those who do not understand the grid of which man's verbal dimension is a part.

We read that Marcus was a founding organizer of the National Humanities Center and remained connected with this organization during his life. Marcus also headed the Presidential Commission on Academic Priorities in the Arts and Sciences.

His voluminous bibiliography includes editing credits. Steven Marcus (with David J. Rothman, and Stephanie A. Kiceluk) put together the anthology Medicine and Western Civilization (1995). This book includes a brilliant excerpt from Michel de Montaigne wherein the faculty of imagination is discussed:

'It is probable that miracles, visions, enchantments, and the like extraordinary occurences derive their credit principally from the power of imagination acting chiefly on the minds of the common people which are more impressionable....[The] mind [may be] unable to free itself from the thought that practises so strange must be based on some secret knowledge....Even brute beasts are subject like ourselves to the force of imagination.

'Witness dogs, who die of grief for the loss of their master...There was seen recently at my house a cat watching a bird on the top of a tree, and the two for some time having fixed their eyes closely upon one another, the bird let herself drop as if dead into the cat's claws, being either dazed by its own imagination or drawn by some power of attraction in the cat...'

I like to recall the fact Marcus wrote the New York Times obituary for Lionel Trilling, which detail seems to bring together an era in intellectual history.