L’Entretien littéraire: anatomie d’un genre. Par Galia Yanoshevsky

Extract

This is a long-awaited and important contribution to the field of literary and media studies, providing as it does the most complete approach to date to the complex genre of the literary interview. It follows on from Galia Yanoshevsky’s earlier work at the crossroads of literature and journalism: her doctoral thesis and a monograph on the paratexts of the nouveau roman (Les Discours du nouveau roman: essais, entretiens, débats (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2006)); several seminal articles; and a special issue on ‘L’Entretien littéraire’ (Argumentation et analyse du discours, 12 (2014)). Yanoshevsky’s new book is composed of six chapters. The first is a history of the genre of the literary interview in France, based on key milestones: from Jules Huret and the press at the end of the nineteenth century to television shows of the early twenty-first century. Chapter 2 analyses the tensions between the oral and the written, in the written format of the interviews. Drawing on performance studies, Chapter 3 then studies the ritualistic dimension of the literary interview as a media event. Chapter 4 raises the question of whether the interview is a literary genre, and answers in the affirmative, combining an analysis of the discursive and institutional aspects of the interview. In Chapter 5, Yanoshevsky studies the transformation of the interview into an archive, and the functions of the latter in turning interviews into part of a literary heritage. The sixth and final chapter examines the place given to the interview in the novel, both as a narrative strategy and as a way to expose the mechanisms of the interview. From a theoretical viewpoint, Yanoshevsky clearly draws on the French tradition of discourse analysis, here used as a central tool while borrowing from literary and media studies. One of the most interesting aspects of this book is its ability to explore a wide range of media and types of interviews, while supplying the reader with detailed studies of specific interviews and the layout of their arguments. Notable, too, is the efficient combination of a synthesis of previous research on the topic and new argumentation, as well as theoretical, analytical, and historical approaches. Yanoshevsky’s book is a hugely important publication on the literary interview, and it will no doubt serve as a solid basis for all future scholarship in the field.