Steven Victor Daniels

Steven Victor Daniels, beloved uncle and brother-in-law, passed away April 24, 2024, at the age of 81. Born January 8, 1943 in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, NY, Steve still had not forgiven the Dodgers for moving to Los Angeles. Steve graduated from Brooklyn College, received his PhD from Harvard University, and retired from SMU’s Department of English in May 2008. Steve had a passion for theatre, ballet, ballroom dancing, Charles Dickens, Charlie Chaplin, and his bubbie’s cooking. He is survived by his sister-in-law Marilyn Daniels, nephews Mark (Christina) Daniels, Kevin (Valerie) Daniels, nieces Lisa (Larry) Caine, Stacy (Jeffrey) Gad, grand nieces and nephews Alexandra (Alex), Matthew (Rachel), Benjamin, Chase, Maddy, David, Sydney, and Justin.

The author of this obituary can find little better to write about Steven than the following found online via an internet search. With minor insignificant edits specific to tense to make reading more natural (present tense to past tense), this obituary’s author hopes with this source statement that he has avoided an accusation of plagiarism which would most certainly have commanded a strong rebuke from the deceased.

The following is excerpted from an April 23, 2008 Meeting of the Faculty of Dedman College, Southern Methodist University as presented by Professor Willard Spiegelman in recognition of retiring faculty:

“Steven Daniels joined SMU’s Department of English in 1969 while completing his PhD from Harvard University, and he brought with him from Brooklyn and Boston a fine sense of irony that forty years in academe made keener. He taught everything in the department from first-year writing to graduate seminars, but his real love was for Victorian literature. One ambitious senior seminar—on Don Quixote, Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, and Joyce’s Ulysses, three great wandering narratives--gives you a sense of the scope of his interests. Meanwhile, he served in every major position in the Department: Director of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies, Vice Chair, chair of many search committees, and at a crucial point, Chair of the department. His work for the College and University included a Provost search committee, Phi Beta Kappa committees, Women’s Studies Council, and numerous committees of the Faculty Senate.

Steve’s two major intellectual interests were in Victorian literature and culture, and in psychoanalysis, profoundly complementary fields in Steve’s work, two ways of looking at human passion. Those who have heard him teach have noted the humor and careful intelligence he would bring to the language of poetry and novels, following out the twisting stories of love, loss, and family one moment, and revealing the astonishing absurdity of the lies, evasions, and delusions contained in those stories the next. The training in psychoanalytic thought attunes him to what is not spoken, or what is spoken slant, a great thing in literary analysis. In a paper he published on The Velveteen Rabbit, a late Victorian children’s story of great sentimentality and cruelty, Steve combines a close reading of the story with equally, and at times hilariously, close readings of Kleinian psychoanalytic theory and his own psychoanalysis. If you have ever wondered about the connections between your mother and a sputtering refrigerator, this is the paper for you. By contrast, if you have read Toni Morrison’s Beloved, you will find his article on Paul D’s story moving and illuminating.

Steve’s academic passion, his almost Talmudic sense of probity and justice, his encyclopedic memory for rules, regulations, and precedents did much to define what the Department of English has become. His gaze could be bracing for those of us who have enjoyed his careful observation of our speech and behavior over the years. His comments on academic business were precise, you might say knife-edged, compelling us to be a bit more honest than we are always comfortable being. More than one Chair of English has noted that Steve has kept the department, and the Chair, in line. In intellectual discussions with him most of us have found ourselves more careful, and less prone to bluster or cant, than we are ordinarily. No wonder he has been admired most by the very best of our students, the ones who were willing to be pushed instead of coddled, and who appreciated analytical subtlety. Outside of academia, Steve had become an expert and joyful ballroom dancer, and he would have been happy to devote much of his retirement to being a student of this art. “

Steven will be missed.