Ivan Kreilkamp teaches in the department of English at Indiana University, where he is also coeditor of the journal Victorian Studies. His publications include Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel (Chicago University Press, 2018) and A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread (Columbia University Press, 2021).
Ivan Kreilkamp
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Writing on Public Books
In the Führerbunker with Carlyle and Yarvin
Curtis Yarvin—and, through him, arguably, Thomas Carlyle—has now emerged as a significant source of ideas for the present administration.
Escape from Earth: Raquel Forner’s Space Paintings
If the iconic NASA astronaut is a confident (male) neo-colonist, Forner’s Astronauts are infantile, unprotected, vulnerable.
B-Sides: J. G. Farrell’s “Troubles”
His characters—in 1919 Ireland, 1857 India, and 1940 Singapore—intuit that the world is about to collapse. But they can do nothing to save it.
Joni Mitchell’s Ferocious Gift
Joni Mitchell’s brilliant art was always a product of artifice as much as it was of honesty.
The Posthuman Enlightenment
What does it take to think beyond the human? Can we imagine our human selves in other lives? And should we? While contemporary answers to these …
Joni Mitchell’s Ferocious Gift
When Joni Mitchell first came to prominence, in the late-1960s “Summer of Love” era, she was often perceived as a kind of “poetess” or “nightingale” folk …
B-Sides: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “Lolly Willowes”
The year 1936 was a watershed for Bloomsbury fellow traveler Sylvia …
Joni Mitchell’s Ferocious Gift
When Joni Mitchell first came to prominence, in the late-1960s “Summer of Love” era, she was often perceived as a kind of “poetess” or “nightingale” folk …
The Last Rock Star?
The most vivid passages of Born to Run recall a childhood that the author seems to have recognized as lost to him almost as soon as he could form a memory of it. Bruce Springsteen grew up “pretty …
Election Day Jitters: A Playlist
Happy Election Day! Once you’ve cast your ballot, there’s not much to do except sit around and wait. Or refresh Twitter every five seconds for rumors about early turnout and voter suppression, get your hopes raised by the New York Times and then dashed by FiveThirtyEight … it’s going to be a long, emotional day. […]
Clever Man Outs Female Author: A Drama in 3 Acts
This month, we witnessed a contemporary version of a drama that we might call “The Female Author’s Disclosure.” It features the following dramatis personae: • The Heroine: a female author who decides to publish under an incognito. • The Confidantes: friends or associates who know her real identity, and are begged to maintain the […]
In Praise of Pulp
Like so many other once-disreputable cultural forms before them, comics over the past several decades have gradually shed many of their debased associations to become a respected aesthetic practice. It’s a familiar dynamic, as that which is first scorned as a low-minded entertainment for degenerates is then rehabilitated as worthy art. Think of the novel; […]
Prince’s Erotic Democracy
In the 1980s, in the shadow of AIDS, Prince (along with Madonna) brought post-disco polymorphous perversity to the mainstream. As Richard Kim beautifully put it in The Nation last week, “If you were …
The Female Body of Punk
A decade after the Sex Pistols were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the once marginal and vilified punk movement has, for better and worse, been thoroughly assimilated as a major aesthetic and cultural force. One welcome effect of this canonizing process has been a recent wave of new memoirs by some […]
Wolves at the Door?
In the past month we’ve seen two different versions of the same phobic imaginative scenario. In it, a precious and vulnerable space, a space that must be protected, is invaded by an imposter, one in disguise, one who takes advantage of liberal sentimentality to enter under false pretenses and do terrible harm. According to the […]
Behind the Dungeon Master’s Screen
From Dickens’s David Copperfield and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus to Elena Ferrante’s Elena Greco, we are familiar with the fictional protagonist as novelist, or as novelist-to-be. Recently, 40 years after E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson invented Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), we have seen the emergence of a new spin on this convention: the fictional protagonist […]
Harmony and Discord
The myth of the inspired musician Orpheus informs some of our most fundamental ideas about the life of the creative artist and performer. Three new novels by Stacey D’Erasmo, Michael Cunningham, and Richard Powers suggest that we can’t stop retelling his story. Orpheus was the first rock star, the archetype of all subsequent sexy, irresistible, […]
Characters of Concealment
In his 2002 New Yorker essay, “Mr. Difficult,” Jonathan Franzen identified William Gass as a prominent member of a group including the likes of William Gaddis, Robert Coover, and John Barth that Franzen had once, but no longer, aspired to join. This “canon of intellectual, socially edgy, white-male American fiction writers … shared the postmodern […]
Churches of Vinyl: Archive and Authenticity in the Pop Music Novel
The recent publication of yet another big novel centrally preoccupied with popular music—Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, one of whose key locations is an East Bay record store in 2004 specializing in used jazz, soul, and R&B vinyl records—invites consideration of what Rick Moody has recently observed is the surprisingly ubiquitous presence, in recent literary fiction, […]
