"Bummer Theory of Print Culture"
Stein is a proponent of “the bummer theory of print culture,” [4] [5] [6] defined as “the use of archival and empirical evidence to challenge the theoretical assumption that, as Cohen puts it, 'cultural work always works.'” [7] The phrase was coined by Lara Langer Cohen as the “bummer school of American literature.”
The bummer theory of print culture argues against the conclusions of scholars including Benedict Anderson and Jürgen Habermas who see the advent and expansion of print technologies as fundamentally aggregative, promoting cohesive social collectivities (e.g. nations or public spheres). In their accounts, print's aggregation happens historically in sync with normal social rules for capitalist economic exchange, what Anderson calls "print-capitalism." [9]
In contrast, the bummer theory of print culture maintains that the advent and expansion of print technologies is disaggregative, reflective of and possibly contributing to existing social divisions. Divisions include social movements or regional audiences who use print oppositionally in relation to national ideologies or public spheres. Print circulation can also depend on forms of exchange other than capitalist economics. For example, in When Novels Were Books, Stein emphasizes the role of late eighteenth-century Protestant philanthropic organizations in circulating texts within, and later apart from, the London printing economy. Other scholars who pursue related points include Cohen, Trish Loughran and Ben Kafka. [11] [12]
In the introduction to Early African American Print Culture, Cohen and Stein lay out three theses that presage the bummer theory print culture:
- A challenge to the presumed to “the presumed universality of what we might call the print-capitalism thesis” (p. 13), showing instead that print tracks with political movements, racial ideologies, regional practices, and generic conventions, all of which can be buttressed by economics, but all of which often are not. Economic circulation is an aspect of social circulation in print culture, “rather than the other way around” (p. 13)
- That texts circulate beyond their creators’ intentions, and so the identification of a text with a social category, for example “African American literature” should be broadened to encompass criteria beyond the identity of the author. [13]
- A recognition of the prevalence of copying and other forms of unoriginality, amount to “a rejection of the specious criteria that maintain that financially compensated original productions are the only meaningful mark of distinction in a print culture” (p. 15).
Studies of Elizabeth and Herman Melville
In 2019, Stein and Adam Fales (U Chicago) published an essay arguing that the 1892 reprinting of four of Herman Melville's novels was spearheaded by his widow, Elizabeth, and not by Arthur Stedman (p. 102) [14] The essay draws on documents from the Gansevoort-Lansing Collection and the Herman Melville Papers at the New York Public Library, and the Stedman Papers at Columbia's Rare Books Library. The authors use this evidence to argue that Elizabeth's hands-on contributions to these posthumous editions were crucial to scholars' later recovery efforts and amount to a "first Melville revival" prior to the one that began in 1919. Following on this research, other scholars have begun rethinking Elizabeth's role in the composition of Herman's late poetry. [15]
Stein and Fales's collaborative work has been reprinted in The Oxford Companion to Herman Melville and featured in an episode of the C19 podcast. [16] A sequel was published in the second edition of A Companion to Herman Melville.
Stein is also at work on a book-length study of the interwar publication of Herman Melville's novels in French translations during the twentieth century. This research has been supported with grants from the NEH and the American Philosophical Society. [17] [18]
