Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled

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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.

Author: Michael Cobb
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 07/02/2012
Pages: 239
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 9.01h x 5.04w x 0.81d
ISBN: 9780814772553

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/30/2012 pg. 124

About the Author
Cobb, Michael: - 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.