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| Subjects: Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Literary Studies |
| Part of the Sexual Cultures Series |
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What single person hasn't suffered? Everyone, it seems, must be (or must want to be) in a couple. To exist
outside of the couple is to assume an antisocial position that is ruthlessly
discouraged because being in a couple is the way most people bind themselves to
the social. Singles might just be the single most reviled sexual minorities
today.
Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled offers a polemic account of this supremacy of the
couple form, and how that supremacy blocks our understanding of the single.
Michael Cobb reads the figurative language surrounding singleness as it traverses
an eclectic set of literary, cultural, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and
popular culture objects from Plato, Freud, Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville,
Virginia Woolf, Barack Obama, Emily Dickinson, Morrissey, Georgia O'Keeffe, and
Hannah Arendt to the Bible, Sex and the
City, Bridget Jones' Diary,
Beyoncé's “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” and HBO's Big Love. Within these flights of fancy, poetry, fiction, strange
moments in film and video, paintings made in the desert, bits of song, and
memoirs of hiking in national parks, Cobb offers an inspired, eloquent
rumination on the single, which is guaranteed to spark conversation and
consideration. |
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Michael Cobb is Professor of English at the University of
Toronto. He is the author of God Hates
Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence, also published by New York
University Press.
View all books by Michael Cobb |
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| | "Although the book is deliberately provocative, with its evocations of the couple’s 'steely, enduring logic' and 'toxic emotional restraints,' it’s most helpful to see Cobb’s radical critique not as an ode to unattached monasticism but as suggestions for how the single perspective’s solitude, privacy, and freedom can open up vistas—even in the lives of the happily coupled." | | -Publishers Weekly |
| | "Single is impressive because its focus is original and discreet and so is his arguments which center heavily on details, at times even the use of single words or on an interpretation." | | -Metapsychology |
| | “Searing, radical, playful, exquisite. This is singular, stunning work. Using the rhythms of banter, suggestion, and devilish claims, Cobb pits the brio, the grandeur of singleness against the deadening form of the couple. Prepare to be provoked by a book as beautiful as it is brilliant." | | -Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century |
| | “Michael Cobb’s new book, Single, is, pun intended, one of a kind. The book’s main argument, that culture abhors a single, unfolds in an engaging way and is studded with beautifully rendered anecdotes, some of a personal nature. Single will be discussed and read for years to come.” | | -Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure |
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