Videos by Kevin Kopelson
A consideration of why various gay writers, including Marcel Proust and Roland Barthes, have favo... more A consideration of why various gay writers, including Marcel Proust and Roland Barthes, have favorite tunes. What is it they love about them? How might this relate to what they love about human beings? 21 views
Articles by Kevin Kopelson
kevinkopelson.com, 2021
I never met Roland Barthes, the critic whose work (in French) I love the most and that always see... more I never met Roland Barthes, the critic whose work (in French) I love the most and that always seems to love me back. Barthes, having been hit by a laundry truck, died at age sixty-four in the year 1980-or when I was just twenty years old. I did, though, meet the American poet, Richard Howard, who having been Barthes' protégé went on to translate most of the man's work. Being a protégé, I myself have found, is like being a child-or as Barthes would have it, "a child getting an erection." "I want maternity and genitality," he explains (in French) in A Lover's Discourse. The translation is by Howard. Howard himself, in verse, writes related lines like these from "Elementary Principles at Seventy-Two"-the last work in the collection Talking Cures: When we consider the stars / (what else can we do with them?) and even / recognize among them sidereal // father-figures (it was our / consideration that arranged them so), they will always outshine us, for we change.
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Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: Re-thinking the Sexed Body in Verse and Visual Culture, 2017
An examination of Ingres's "difficult" queerness as well as of my own.
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The Iowa Review, 2015
An elegy for my mother.
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Creative Criticism: An Anthology and Guide, 2014
The chapter on "maiden" piano teachers in my book "Beethoven's Kiss."
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Nat. Brut, 2013
"The Fashion System," by Roland Barthes, was this most pleasurable of critics’ least pleasurable ... more "The Fashion System," by Roland Barthes, was this most pleasurable of critics’ least pleasurable text. It was also his least personal one. Another problem is that, by analyzing – structurally – the mere verbiage of fashion magazine advertisements, Barthes failed to see and hence to understand there what images they present. I can imagine, though, or fantasize, how he might have re-written this book, more pleasurably, as a post-structuralist attentive to such images – which is to say, the way I myself usually write but also, more importantly, the way Barthes himself later did. And so – with lots of help from Judith Thurman in "Cleopatra’s Nose" – I attempt here that revision for him.
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Masculinity in Opera: Gender, History, and New Musicology, 2013
An essay on Saint-Saëns's grand opera, "Samson et Dalila," which investigates how the infantile c... more An essay on Saint-Saëns's grand opera, "Samson et Dalila," which investigates how the infantile construction of the opera's eponymous hero can be justified, or at least better understood, in the context of the death of the composer's two sons and which, using Barthes's concept of "holophrase," traces the challenges to adult male subjectivity that Samson presents.
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English Language Notes, 2012
A response to "Keeping and Eye on Each Other" by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, coauthored w... more A response to "Keeping and Eye on Each Other" by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, coauthored with Shane McCrae.
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n+1, 2009
An elegy for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: 1950-2009.
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Forty Years after Stonewall, 2009
A personal essay on academic "father-hood."
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London Review of Books, 2008
An essay on plagiarism.
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The Massachusetts Review, 2008
An analysis of literary confession.
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The Iowa Review, 2007
An essay on the experience that various pianists - either amateur or professional - have had when... more An essay on the experience that various pianists - either amateur or professional - have had when first hearing themselves play.
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The Iowa Review, 2002
An essay on literary critics either showing off or not showing off.
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Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities on and off the Stage, 2001
The chapter on the ballet "Schéhérazade" in my book "The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky."
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The Iowa Review, 2001
An analysis of various failures - on the part of some readers of Proust, of some translators of P... more An analysis of various failures - on the part of some readers of Proust, of some translators of Proust, and of Proust himself - to complete "Remembrance of Things Past."
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Journal x, 1999
An essay on the eroticism of the subway.
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GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1996
The chapter on mourning in my book "Beethoven's Kiss."
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Franco-Italica, 1994
A French translation of the chapter on pederasty in my book "Love's Litany."
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Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, 1993
An analysis of transgressive sexual behavior in Gilbert and Sullivan's "Patience."
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