Jordan Alexander Stein

Avidly Reads Theory by Jordan Alexander Stein is a view of what enjoying theory was for him and his select group of fellow students and ultimately colleagues. This certainly holds a fair amount of truth but is more about people like him than most people who love and do theory.

I was really getting into theory at about the same time as he was, so I saw some of what he describes when he reflects back. I am probably a slightly different case since by the time I started my undergraduate, well, the one that led to my humanities degrees, I was 31 and had real life experiences to tie to the theories. So everyone from Kant and Heidegger through Foucault, Butler, and Deleuze spoke to me both abstractly and concretely. In other words, I was grounded and saw (and still see) these theories as tools for change and understanding, not simply ego fodder like him.

I hope, when I used theory in teaching, I managed to instill something beyond just thinking for thinking sake. I value thinking for thinking sake but if that is all it is, then it is empty. I don't know, nor based on this book do I care, whether he ever actually outgrew his inflated thinking. I didn't see evidence of it here, no matter what he says. But that is a dynamic between a reader and a writer. What might be one reader's reliable writer is another's very unreliable writer. And I think I made my position known.

I would still recommend this to those interested in theory simply as a cautionary tale of how you look when you get an overblown sense of self-importance. And some of the anecdotes were humorous, though most only showed him, again, trying too hard to be what he isn't, engaging.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss.… (altro)