Style

Assembles texts, performances, and personae from American culture to assert the elemental natureof styleWhile âEURœstyleâEUR? 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 BlackâEUR(TM)s interdisciplinary conceptual analysis assembles texts, performances, and personae from American culture that engage in ethical, creative, and performative modes of what he terms âEURœabundant revelation.âEUR? Moving back and forth through time, this book sketches American cosmologies cultivated by iconic and subterranean American artists like Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery OâEUR(TM)Connor, Nikki Giovanni, and Bob Dylan. Presiding throughout is the bookâEUR(TM)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 attunementâEUR"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 newâEUR"the mystery of becoming.