TY - JOUR TI - Time out of mind DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3X3505N PY - 2015 AB - The two main themes or theoretical modes characterized in “Time Out of Mind”—style and the untimely—are the result of my own desire to imagine for myself and others a kind of inquiry that evades the moral requirements of the very modes of inquiry from which my knowledge and my critical sensibilities emerge. Style is, as Quentin Crisp has already explained, “at its broadest sense, consciousness.” It is the process of dedicating oneself and one’s reading practices to this ongoing process of becoming that characterizes the ways of style and indeed marks my path here as I approach the work of four artists: Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O’Connor, Quentin Crisp and Bob Dylan. Style is, above all, invested in matters beyond the present; as an aesthetic cosmology, style is an ethics rooted in the ontology of being and committed, in practice, to the art of becoming. Becoming, as I will soon define and explain in detail, is a conscious aesthetic process that revels in the coeval coming-to-be and passing away of the world. In art and philosophy, becomings are always in a combined pursuit of pleasures and sensations that exist prior to and beneath knowledge and representation as well as poised towards visions of futures not-yet-seen and not-yet-known. The untimely, as I will call it and that I will also deal throughout “Time Out of Mind,” is the quality produced by this kind of consciousness of ontology. An untimely artist is, then, an artist consumed with, as Nietzsche has described it, the triumph of the will over morality and an overcoming of the history of knowledge: “becoming alongside a radical negation of the concept of being.” In the end between an ethics of the untimely art of becoming is at the heart of what I would like to propose we call the practice of style. Time Out of Mind: Style and the Art of Becoming” should be of interest to scholars in: American Studies, Literature, Gender Studies, Continental Philosophy and Queer Theory. KW - American Studies LA - eng ER -