Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780814772553)

A radical defense of a solitary life

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
ISBN-10: 0814772552
ISBN-13: 9780814772553
Publisher: New York University Press
Language: English
Published: 07/02/2012
Pages: 239
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 9.01h x 5.04w x 0.81d

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