Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled (Sexual Cultures, 45)

Cobb, Michael

ISBN 10: 0814772552 / ISBN 13: 9780814772553

Published by NYU Press, 2012

Seller Inventory # 0814772552-3-35662244

Synopsis:

A radical defense of a solitary life
What single person hasn't suffered? Everyone, it seems, must be (or must want to be) in a couple. To exist outside of the couple is to assume an antisocial position that is ruthlessly discouraged because being in a couple is the way most people bind themselves to the social. Singles might just be the single most reviled sexual minorities today.
Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled offers a polemic account of this supremacy of the
couple form, and how that supremacy blocks our understanding of the single. Michael Cobb reads the figurative language surrounding singleness as it traverses an eclectic set of literary, cultural, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and popular culture objects from Plato, Freud, Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Barack Obama, Emily Dickinson, Morrissey, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Hannah Arendt to the Bible, Sex and the City, Bridget Jones' Diary, Beyoncé's “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” and HBO's Big Love. Within these flights of fancy, poetry, fiction, strange moments in film and video, paintings made in the desert, bits of song, and memoirs of hiking in national parks, Cobb offers an inspired, eloquent
rumination on the single, which is guaranteed to spark conversation and consideration.

About the Author: Michael Cobb is Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence, also published by New York University Press.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled (Sexual ...
Publisher: NYU Press
Publication Date: 2012
Binding: paperback
Condition: Good