Taylor Black is Assistant Professor of English at Duke University
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