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Para-Literary Performers
John Rodden
Performing the Literary Interview. U of Nebraska P us $70.00.
Marilyn Randall
Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit, and Power. U of Toronto P $60.00
Performing the Literary Interview features interviews with nine contemporary authors: Rick Bass, W.S. Di Piero, Frank Conroy, Marge Piercy, Gerald Stern, Richard Howard, John Nathan, Camille Paglia, and Isabel Allende. The interviews were conducted between 1994-97 and vary greatly in length, ranging from a five-page chat with Conroy to a twenty-seven-page debate with Paglia. All the interviews have been published before, but John Rodden has collected them here and appended an introduction in order to argue that the literary interview is a genre unto itself and worthy of critical attention. Rodden maintains that the manner in which the interviewees present themselves-that is, their voice, gesture, and rhetoric-constitutes a particular generic language that has been overlooked. Rodden aims to redress this oversight by identifying some generic features of the interview and situating this new genre somewhere between biography and performance theory.
According to Rodden, the first literary interview was published in France in 1884. However, his introduction traces the emergence of the interview from its disreputable status in the early nineteenth century (as a branch of American journalism) to its more authoritative status in the twenty-first century (as a mainstay of academic journals). From the wide range of interview styles that has developed over this period of time, Rodden devises three categories in which to place his interview subjects: Traditionalists, Raconteurs, and Advertisers. Traditionalists answer questions in a businesslike manner, placing emphasis on their writing and not on themselves. Raconteurs, in contrast, speak readily about themselves and have a flair for anecdotes and asides. Advertisers, finally,...