Jordan Alexander Stein – författare

A literary scholar explains how eighteenth-century novels were manufactured, sold, bought, owned, collected, and read alongside Protestant religious texts. As the novel developed into a mature genre, it had to distinguish itself from these similar-looking books and become what we now call “literature.”Literary scholars have explained the rise of the Anglophone novel using a range of tools, from Ian Watt’s theories to James Watt’s inventions. Contrary to established narratives, When Novels Were Books reveals that the genre beloved of so many readers today was not born secular, national, middle-class, or female.For the first three centuries of their history, novels came into readers’ hands primarily as printed sheets ordered into a codex bound along one edge between boards or paper wrappers. Consequently, they shared some formal features of other codices, such as almanacs and Protestant religious books produced by the same printers. Novels are often mistakenly credited for developing a formal feature (“character”) that was in fact incubated in religious books.The novel did not emerge all at once: it had to differentiate itself from the goods with which it was in competition. Though it was written for sequential reading, the early novel’s main technology for dissemination was the codex, a platform designed for random access. This peculiar circumstance led to the genre’s insistence on continuous, cover-to-cover reading even as the “media platform” it used encouraged readers to dip in and out at will and read discontinuously. Jordan Alexander Stein traces this tangled history, showing how the physical format of the book shaped the stories that were fit to print.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw both the consolidation of American print culture and the establishment of an African American literary tradition, yet the two are too rarely considered in tandem. In this landmark volume, a stellar group of established and emerging scholars ranges over periods, locations, and media to explore African Americans' diverse contributions to early American print culture, both on the page and off.The book's chapters consider domestic novels and gallows narratives, Francophone poetry and engravings of Liberia, transatlantic lyrics and San Francisco newspapers. Together, they consider how close attention to the archive can expand the study of African American literature well beyond matters of authorship to include issues of editing, illustration, circulation, and reading-and how this expansion can enrich and transform the study of print culture more generally.

Since her death in 2003, Nina Simone has been the subject of an astonishing number of rereleased, remastered, and remixed albums and compilations as well as biographies, films, viral memes, samples, and soundtracks. In Fantasies of Nina Simone, Jordan Alexander Stein uses an archive of Simone’s performances, images, and writings to examine the space between our collective and individual fantasies about Simone the performer, civil rights activist, and icon, and her own fantasies about herself. Stein outlines how Simone gave voice to personal fantasies through releasing dozens of covers of her white male contemporaries. With her covers of George Harrison, the Bee Gees, Bob Dylan, and others, Simone explored and claimed the power and perspective that come with race and gender privilege. Looking at examples from Simone’s four-decade genre-bending career-from songbook standards, jazz, and pop to folk, junkanoo, and reggae-and at her work’s many uptakes and afterlives, Stein mobilizes the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to build a black feminist history with and for this multifaceted performing artist.

Since her death in 2003, Nina Simone has been the subject of an astonishing number of rereleased, remastered, and remixed albums and compilations as well as biographies, films, viral memes, samples, and soundtracks. In Fantasies of Nina Simone, Jordan Alexander Stein uses an archive of Simone’s performances, images, and writings to examine the space between our collective and individual fantasies about Simone the performer, civil rights activist, and icon, and her own fantasies about herself. Stein outlines how Simone gave voice to personal fantasies through releasing dozens of covers of her white male contemporaries. With her covers of George Harrison, the Bee Gees, Bob Dylan, and others, Simone explored and claimed the power and perspective that come with race and gender privilege. Looking at examples from Simone’s four-decade genre-bending career-from songbook standards, jazz, and pop to folk, junkanoo, and reggae-and at her work’s many uptakes and afterlives, Stein mobilizes the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to build a black feminist history with and for this multifaceted performing artist.

"Theory offered us a way of understanding the world that, like so many youthful exuberances, was both vital and ridiculous."As an avowed "theory head," Jordan Alexander Stein confronts a contradiction: that the abstract, and often frustrating rigors of theory also produced a sense of pride and identity for him and his friends: an idea of how to be and a way to live. Although Stein explains what theory is, this is not an introduction or a how-to. Organized around five ways that theory makes us feel—silly, stupid, sexy, seething and stuck—Stein travels back to the late nineties to tell a story of coming of age at a particular moment and to measure how that moment lives on now.Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author's emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life. This is a story about the emotional lives of ideas.