Performing the Literary Interview

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, this is an 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 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.

Table of Contents:
Contents:AcknowledgmentsNote to ReadersIntroduction: The Literary Interview as Public PerformancePart 1. The Traditionalists1. Wild Man: Rick Bass2. The Thinking Poet: W. S. Di Piero3. The Masters' Apprentice: Frank Conroy4. "Bitter" Poet-Prophet: Marge PiercyPart 2. The Raconteurs5. Splendor in the Weeds: Gerald Stern6. The Masked Man of Letters: Richard Howard7. The Translator as Team Player: John NathanPart 3. The Advertisers8. The Performing Artist-Intellectual: Camille Paglia9. The Chilean Scheherazade: Isabel AllendeNotesSelected BibliographySource Acknowledgments

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

Review :
"Here is a strong and timely book, rich in implication for all who study the complex culture we inhabit. Anyone interested in our current intellectual trajectory should quickly open these covers."--Michael Levenson, University of Virginia "Performing the Literary Interview makes a major contribution to understanding an increasingly popular genre of public discourse. This book deserves a wide readership."--James van Oosting, Seton Hall University "John Rodden takes the art of the literary interview to a new level of achievement in this book."--James Arnt Aune, The Pennsylvania State University