Apotheosis of the Peacock: On Queerness, Repetition, and Style

Taylor Black is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in 20th Century American Literature, Popular Music Studies, and Queer Theory.  He is currently working on two new projects: Cult of Personality: An American Romance, on the American fascination with cults and cult leaders and Butterfly on the Wheel, a critical biography of Quentin Crisp and cultural history of New York's Downtown Arts scene during the 1980s. Black is the author of the 2023 book Style: A Queer Cosmology (NYU Press) 

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.