Style : A Queer Cosmology

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. Contents Introduction: The Elementals of Style Part I. The Mystery of Personality: Queerness as Style Introduction 1. Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds: On Queerness, Repetition, and Style 2. It Takes a Sheep: Flannery O’Connor’s Backward Prophets Part II. The Arrow of Time: Style and the Problems of History and Originality Introduction 3. The Poe Machine: Style and the Strange Futures of American Literary Studies 4. Shadow Kingdom: A Bob Dylan Ghost Story Part III.The Critic as Stylist: Toward a Theory of Attunement Introduction 5. The Musical (Re)Turn: Listening in American Literary Criticism 6. The Intensive Zone: Pragmatism, Postmaterialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, and Other Forms of Belief as Method 7. Ambivalence and Attunement: On Our Field Formations and Deformations Coda: The Universe That Encloses the Universe Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Author