Style: A Queer Cosmology: 37 (Postmillennial Pop) - Softcover

Black, Taylor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 147982500X ISBN 13: 9781479825004

Publisher: NYU Press, 2023

Synopsis

Assembles texts, performances, and personae from American culture to assert the elemental nature
of style
While “style” is equated with fashion or convention in common parlance, Style: A Queer Cosmology defines the term as a mode of expression that makes us more like ourselves and less like everyone else. Taylor Black’s interdisciplinary conceptual analysis assembles texts, performances, and personae from American culture that engage in ethical, creative, and performative modes of what he terms “abundant revelation.” Moving back and forth through time, this book sketches American cosmologies cultivated by iconic and subterranean American artists like Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O’Connor, Nikki Giovanni, and Bob Dylan. Presiding throughout is the book’s conceptual guide: latter-day American and notorious homosexual Quentin Crisp, resurrected here as a philosopher of style.
As a scholarly intervention, Style participates in the critical work of revival and attunement―revitalizing figures, terms, and ideas that have become too familiar. Returning to viewing the critic as a stylist, Style: A Queer Cosmology leans into the study of things and qualities that are immanent and elude paraphrase or social scientific categorization. Style is about the possible rather than the probable, singularity over universals, personality instead of identity, the emergent and not the new―the mystery of becoming.

About this title

About the Author

Taylor Black is Assistant Professor of English at Duke University

Edition details

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 147982500X
• ISBN 13: 9781479825004
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304