The Imagined Interview: A Literary Genre

While “press interview” is an umbrella term defining all journalistic interviews that circulate among different media, I propose to call “imagined interview” the literary genre that writers create by imagining the interviewer, the interviewee, or both as fictional characters. By analyzing examples within the French, Italian, and English literary fields in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I identify three types of the imagined interview based on the interlocutor who is invented in each of them—the self-interview, the impossible interview, and the fictional interview. In addition, I examine the imagined interview in book, radio, and theater because, like the press interview, the imagined interview spans different media. Re-staging some characteristics of the press interview, the imagined interview does not merely represent the writer’s revenge on the press, exemplified in this genre by the interviewer’s caricature. Above all, it shows us the different uses that literature and the press make of the same principle of character investigation: indiscretion.