Style: A Queer Cosmology (Postmillennial Pop, 37)

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.

Literature & Fiction

Black, Taylor

History & Criticism

NYU Press

For Taylor Black, that Friday night was like any other in her senior year in high school. A quick dip in the shower then off to see her girlfriends and boyfriend Jeff. Just another Friday night in a small Florida town, until she blacked out in the shower and her mom rushed her to the emergency room—and another life: one of brain scans and surgeries, chemotherapy, 60 Minutes, hospitals and hospice. Something that always happened to someone else happened to her, and to her family as well. Taylor kept a diary through the ordeal as she tried to live as normal a life as possible with brain cancer. Daydreams & Diaries details the roller-coaster ride that is cancer, and how Taylor coped as a patient and grew as a person, changing from an insecure high school girl to a courageous young woman. Her spirit attracted the cameras of CBS and the attention of Ed Bradley, who called her “amazing.” Twenty-seven million people saw her on 60 Minutes, but CBS couldn’t tell Taylor’s whole story, for she was far more than a cancer patient; she was a beloved daughter, sister and friend who showed, as a noted author once wrote, “grace under pressure.” Taylor’s father, Tim Black, brings a father’s memories of Taylor at different points in her life, helping to complete the portrait of a remarkable young woman who was the inspiration for so many.

Daydreams & Diaries

Biographies & Memoirs

Black, Tim

Professionals & Academics

Untreed Reads Publishing, LLC

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