The Authentic Artwork? The Paris Review Author Interview

The interview is a peculiar form. Ranging from good cop bad cop interrogations to Prime Minister’s Question Time to Plato’s dialogues to the chat show, the interview is multipurpose and pervades modern culture. The literary interview (a term which is used variously to refer to the interviewee, the content or the style of presentation) is so popular that one critic has complained that poets don’t write essays anymore, they give interviews (Bawer 424). Search “interview” in Project Muse or JSTOR and the hits number in the hundreds of thousands. Yet critical analysis of the use of the interview for literary (as distinct from more scientific) purposes is limited to a handful of articles. We must ask why this is.