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.
Industry Reviews
A breathtaking and utterly original exploration of a distinctively American style of becoming more and more oneself, that is, as a way cultivating difference. No longer linked to fashion or popularity, style here is an ongoing mode of self-elaboration, of becoming, of making the most of one's limits. Taylor Black explores unruly stylists who create unique forms of attunement that enable each to become more than themselves, to unleash new forces larger than themselves, to become cosmic. This book is itself stylish, smart, witty, and wise. -- Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics and the Limits of Materialism
Engages in revival, attachment, attunement-opening up reading/writing practices to more intensive forms of aesthetic difference, queer world-making, trans-temporal appreciation. Taylor Black's approach is playfully profound in exposition, capaciously eclectic, bursting with insights, meandering yet guided by crucial preoccupations, pushing to edges of sonic implication and comprising, in effect, a 'queer utopic' of perpetually energized becoming. The style of Style itself is everywhere fresh, learned, engaged, funny, recklessly alive, full of unexpected twists, linkages, and masks: in a word, preternaturally smart. -- Rob Wilson, author of Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetic
