Interviews

Interviews can be a wonderful platform for the dissemination of scholarly knowledge, but they can also be scholarly investigations in their own right. In a contribution to the journal Victoriographies, I present an alternative version of my interview with J. Hillis Miller – a second remediation, one might say. Certain elements that have a performative function in the film have been excised, and the linguistic register has been slightly adjusted to suit the standards of the written interview. In a similar vein, the order of the segments in the first half has been changed. Most importantly, each part of the interview is preceded by a question, but these questions merely echo the ones that I asked during the interview: they are a rhetorical construction that is supposed to guide the reader in the same way that images and sound guide the viewer of the film. I hope that this altered and remediated transcript can mimic the self- reflective quality of J. Hillis Miller’s own prose.

And there is the promise of more to come. Next week, it is my privilege to interview two prominent Irish novelists at the St Patrick's Festival in Amsterdam. John Banville will be talking about his latest work, Mrs Osmond, which is a sequel (of sorts) to Henry James's Portrait of a Lady. The interview will be interspersed with chamber music by Brahms and Fauré. At the centre of Sara Baume's interview is her second novel, A Line Made By Walking. The Dutch publishing house Querido has just issued translations of both novels.