Performing the Literary Interview: How Writers Craft Their Public Selves - Softcover

Rodden, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080322236X ISBN 13: 9780803222366

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2007

Synopsis

When authors are interviewed about their books or themselves, much more is going on than a simple conversation. The interview becomes a performance space for authorial orchestration and self-promotion, and interviewers in turn respond to such self-display and theatrics. Featuring absorbing conversations with nine well-known authors, including poets Richard Howard and Gerald Stern, novelist Isabel Allende, and scholar-intellectual Camille Paglia, Performing the Literary Interview is the first in-depth look at this type of performance art. Interviews with poets, fiction writers, and intellectuals enable John Rodden to identify a range of rhetorical strategies and their effects and to formulate a typology for appreciating the various roles that interviewers and interviewees assume. Traditionalists foreground their work rather than themselves, raconteurs are storytellers who skillfully spin anecdotes and creatively showcase their personalities, and advertisers more explicitly use the literary interview to promote and sell themselves. This pioneering, persuasive study stakes a claim to a new area of scholarly inquiry in the humanities. The literary interview can no longer be considered only as a voyeuristic window on an author, or a celebrity vehicle, or even an entertaining diversion, but should also be approached as a serious genre meriting scholarly attention and analysis.

About this title

About the Author:

John Rodden is the author of six books, including Lionel Trilling and the Critics: Opposing Selves (Nebraska 1999).

From Library Journal:

Rodden (Lionel Trilling and the Critics: Opposing Selves) carefully examines the genre of the literary interview, dividing authors into three basic types according to their interview personae. There are the traditionalists, who emphasize their works; the raconteurs, who focus on the anecdote; and the advertisers, who promote themselves and their work. Rodden includes nine interviews with authors in various literary genres, including Rick Bass, Marge Piercy, Gerald Stern, Camille Paglia, and Isabel Allende. Each interview begins with an introduction about the author and the process of the interview, followed by the question-and-answer dialog. The interviews are well orchestrated, revealing the literary personalities of each of the authors and how their lives relate to their craft and "to their self and public images." Rodden thus makes a claim for the author interview as a literary genre of its own. This successful study provides well-crafted models in support of its thesis. Recommended for academic and large public libraries. Sue Samson, Univ. of Montana, Missoula
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 080322236X
• ISBN 13: 9780803222366
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276