Jeffrey Williams has convincingly demonstrated that “the critical interview has emerged as a major genre in literary and cultural studies,” and to support his claim, he has shown how a wide array of journals “have run more than three hundred such interviews, and several have made them a regular feature.” Williams would certainly know the importance of the critical interview, as he is well known for his more than ninety interviews with famous critics, writers, and philosophers. Williams’s work is crucial for interview studies. While Williams was conducting some of his work on the “critical interview,” another type of interview was taking shape. Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after a real person, and as a literary form, it has baffled some of the most adept scholars and intellectuals. To clarify what biofictionalists actually do, Michael Lackey interviewed a number of authors of biofiction, which resulted in his book Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists. That book did so well that Bloomsbury commissioned another volume of interviews, this time with biofictionalists from across the globe. That book contains interviews of scholars from multiple countries with luminaries like Olga Tokarczuk, Rosa Montero, Colum McCann, David Lodge, Laurent Binet, and Barbara Chase-Riboud. There might be some differences in the approaches and objectives of Williams and Lackey to the interview, but there are many deep-level similarities. In this panel, contributors, who are either or both practitioners or theorists of the interview, will discuss the history of but also theorize the literary interview, clarifying its value for academia more generally.

Williams will start with a paper clarifying “What the Interview Offers.” The interview is typically considered a lower intellectual form, marginal to real literary work. Or shill, a function of market culture and under suspicion. But Williams will make the case for what interviews can do: they often clarify and elucidate a writer’s (or critic’s) work in a way that rarely appears otherwise. They can provide a synthetic overview, like a retrospective of an artist’s work, that makes sense of their work in a way that was not possible otherwise. They offer accounts of the experience of doing literature and knowledge about its professional channels. Moreover, they present professional work in more colloquial forms, an entryway for wider publics. Finally, they present a qualitative understanding of the experience of doing literature, forming a needed complement to now-ubiquitous quantitative investigations.

Rebecca Roach, who is widely known for her 2018 book Literature and the Rise of the Interview, will discuss what critical light interview studies might shed on Generative AI chat interfaces. This paper will be part of her current book project, which focuses on the literary and intellectual history of computers as talking machines (as opposed to AI’s vision of thinking machines). She will clarify how the interview exchange has shaped conversational AI interfaces today, thus illustrating how we can see the interview as interface history.

Virginia Rademacher, one of the most prominent scholars of biofiction who has interviewed biofictionalists such as Javier Cercas, Rosa Montero, and Álvaro Enrigue, will talk about the interview as dialogic imagination. Alongside Bakhtin's explorations, “dialogue” originates from the Greek dialogos, with logos meaning word and dia meaning through. The etymology of dia (as movement across) also carries the creative potential for thought to wander, transform, and traverse new thresholds. The best interviews are never those in which either the writer or the interviewer approaches the conversation to impart or extract some sort of explanation or answer. Instead, it is through the dialogic interplay that both interlocutors, and by extension the wider world of their audiences, are ideally awakened — as dia suggests — through curiosity and humanistic questioning to new ways of seeing and understanding. In her paper, Rademacher will discuss how her interviews with Cercas, Montero, and Enrigue have yielded the best insights when the interview seemingly appears to go sideways.

The panelists have all agreed to abide by a sixteen-minute limit so that there will be sufficient time for questions.