The Interview.pdf

The Interview
Christopher Silvester
Jude Joseph
PGT English
KVS

Christopher Silvester
❖ born in 1959
❖ 1983 to 1994 he worked for Private Eye
❖ worked for several newspapers and
magazines -
Evening Standard, the Guardian,
the Observer, the Independent on Sunday,
Esquire, GQ and Vanity Fair.
Jude Joseph, PGT English

The Penguin Book of Interviews: An
Anthology from 1859 to the
Present Day.
The lesson ‘The Interview’ is taken
from this book - from the
introduction to the book edited by
Christopher Silvester.

The lesson ‘The Interview’ is divided into two parts-
I. Opinions on interview by various
celebrities/writers.
II. An interview of Umberto Eco by
Mukund Padmanabhan.

PART - I INTERVIEW
❖ invented a little over 130 years ago
❖ a commonplace of journalism
❖ its functions, methods & merits vary
considerably
❖ in its highest form its a source of truth
❖ in its practice an art

View of Celebrities on Interviews
❖ They see themselves as victims.
❖ They despise the interview.
❖ They see it as an unwarranted intrusion
into their lives.
❖ They feel that interview diminishes them.

V S Naipaul -
Some people are wounded by interviews & lose a part
of themselves
Lewis Carroll
had horror of the interviewer
he never consented to be interviewed
he had the fear of being lionized

Rudyard Kipling
➢ had a condemnatory attitude towards the interviewer
➢ he considered it immoral, a crime, cowardly and vile
➢ “No respectable man would ask it, much less give it.”
➢ Kipling himself interviewed Mark Twain.

H G Wells
Wells referred to “the interviewing ordeal”.
He was a frequent interviewee
He interviewed Joseph Stalin.
Saul Bellow
consented to be interviewed but described interviews as
being like thumbprints on his windpipe.

Views on Interview
“.......it is a supremely serviceable medium of
communication.”
Denis Brian
“…our most vivid impressions of our contemporaries are
through interviews”
“.....interviewer holds a position of unprecedented power
and influence.”

PART - II Interview with Umberto Eco
➢ Umberto Eco is interviewed by Mukund
Padmanabhan from The Hindu
➢ Umberto Eco - Professor, University of Bologna,
Italy
➢ He’s an expert on -
○ Semiotics
○ Literary interpretation
○ Medieval aesthetics

Umberto Eco’s Literary Output
❖ Academic texts
❖ Essays
❖ Children’s books
❖ Newspaper articles
❖ Literary ﬁction
❖ Eco’s written output is staggeringly large & wide-ranging

The Name of the Rose (1980) ★ debut novel by Italian author
Umberto Eco
★ It is a historical murder mystery
set in an Italian monastery in
the year 1327
★ an intellectual mystery
combining semiotics in ﬁction,
metaphysics, theology and
medieval history
★ a bestseller - sold more than 10
million copies.

“........I am always doing the same thing.”
★ Umberto Eco has certain philosophical interests.
★ He pursues those philosophical interests through both
his academic work and his novels.
★ Even his books for children are about non-violence and
peace the same bunch of ethical and philosophical
ideas.

Eco’s Concept of Interstices
★ He says if we eliminate all empty spaces from the
universe
★ eliminate all empty spaces in all the atoms, then
the universe will become as big as his fist.
★ We have a lot of empty spaces in our lives
★ Eco calls them interstices
★ Eco works in empty spaces.

Eco’s Non-ﬁctional Writing
❖ His scholarly work has a playful & personal quality
(Regular academic work is depersonalised, dry &
boring)
❖ Eco has an informal approach
❖ He told the story of his research - including his
trials & errors.
❖ His essays always had a narrative aspect.

Regret of Roland Barthes
❖ Roland Barthes was always frustrated that he was
an essayist & not a novelist.
❖ He wanted to do creative writing but he died before
he could do so.
❖ Eco started writing novels by accident
❖ Novels satisﬁed Eco’s taste for narration

★ Eco considers himself a university professor who writes novels
on Sunday.
★ By writing novels he reaches a larger audience
★ Journalist and publishers believe that people don’t like diﬃcult
reading experiences.
★ ‘Name of the Rose’ is a serious novel and sold between 10- 15
million copies.
★ It is exactly these kinds of readers who don’t want easy
experiences

V S Naipaul Important Works
★ A House for Mr Biswas
★ In a Free State
★ A Bend in the River
★ The Enigma of Arrival

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul ( 1932 – 2018)
❖ a Trinidadian-British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in
English
❖ In the late 19th century, Naipaul's grandparents had emigrated
from India to work in Trinidad's cocoa plantations as indentured
servants
❖ He published more than thirty books over fifty years
❖ 1971 - won the Booker Prize - In a Free State
❖ 1990 - received a knighthood in Britain
❖ 2001 - the Nobel Prize in Literature

Lewis Carroll (1832 – 1898)
❖ Real Name - Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson
❖ an English writer of
world-famous children's ﬁction
❖ Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland and its sequel
Through the Looking-Glass
❖ He was noted for his facility at
word play, logic, and fantasy

Lewis Carroll - Most important work

Joseph Rudyard Kipling
(1865 – 1936) ➔ an English journalist, short-story
writer, poet, and novelist
➔ He was born in India, which
inspired much of his work
➔ He is regarded as a major
innovator in the art of the short
story; his children's books are
classics of children's literature.
➔ 1907 (age of 41), he was awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature

Rudyard Kipling -
Important Works
Novels -
The Jungle Book (1894)
Kim (1901)
Short Stories like - "The Man Who
Would Be King" (1888).
Poems -
Mandalay (1890)
Gunga Din (1890)
The Gods of the Copybook
Headings (1919),
The White Man's Burden (1899)

Rudyard Kipling & Caroline Starr Balestiar

Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)
❖ Real Name - Samuel Langhorne Clemens
❖ an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer
❖ Novels
➢ The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
➢ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), "The Great American Novel".
❖ His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics
and peers
❖ He was lauded as the "greatest humorist this country has produced"

Herbert George Wells
(1866 – 1946)
❖ an English writer
❖ "father of science ﬁction"
❖ best remembered for
science ﬁction novels
❖ he has written dozens of
novels, short stories, and
works of social commentary,
satire, biography, and
autobiography.

H.G.Wells - Important Works
His science ﬁction imagined time
travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and
biological engineering.
The Time Machine (1895)
The Island of Doctor Moreau
(1896)
The Invisible Man (1897)
The War of the Worlds (1898)

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin
(1878 – 1953)
● a Georgian revolutionary
and Soviet politician
● Posts held -
➢ General Secretary of the
Communist Party of the
Soviet Union
(1922–1953)
➢ Premier (1941–1953)

Joseph Stalin
● by the 1930s - he was the country's de facto dictator
● led his country through its post-war reconstruction,
during which it developed a nuclear weapon in 1949
● His totalitarian government has been widely
condemned for overseeing mass repressions, ethnic
cleansing, deportations, hundreds of thousands of
executions, and famines which killed millions.

Saul Bellow (1915 – 2005) ★ a Canadian-American writer
★ Bellow was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize
for Literature
★ Best-known works -
➔ The Adventures of Augie March
➔ Henderson the Rain King
➔ Herzog
➔ Mr. Sammler's Planet
➔ Seize the Day
➔ Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein

Denis Brian (born 1923, Cardiff)
★ Denis Brian is a
journalist and book writer
★ Notable for the
biographies
➢ Einstein: a life.
➢ Joseph Pulitzer: A Life

David John Lodge (born 28 January 1935)
★ an English author and literary critic
★ a professor of English Literature
★ he is known for novels satirising academic life & other theme is
Roman Catholism
Imp. Works:
➢ Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975)
➢ Small World: An Academic Romance (1984)
➢ Nice Work (1988)
➢ The Picturegoers

Mukund Padmanabhan ★ studied in Chennai, Delhi and
at the London School of
Economics
★ worked brieﬂy as a lecturer in
Delhi University
★ switched to Journalism later
★ worked with The Indian
Express before joining The
Hindu &
★ later The Businessline

Roland Gérard Barthes
(1915 – 1980)
★ a French literary theorist,
philosopher, critic, and
semiotician
★ Barthes' ideas explored a
diverse range of ﬁelds
★ he inﬂuenced the development
of many schools of theory,
including structuralism,
semiotics, social theory, design
theory, anthropology, and
post-structuralism.

The Hindu -
estd. as a daily in 1889
★ an Indian daily newspaper,
headquartered in Chennai
★ the second most circulated
English-language newspaper in
India, after The Times of India.
★ 1995 - became the ﬁrst Indian
newspaper to offer an online
edition.
★ The Hindu is published from 21
locations across 11 states

The Penguin Book of Interviews: An
Anthology from 1859 to the Present Day
This anthology ranges from the ﬁrst interview (with Brigham Young, the
leader of the Mormon Church) which appeared in 1859 in the "New York
Herald" right up to the present day. It is not only a history of the art of the
interview, but also a picture of the last 130 years. Karl Marx, Giuseppe
Verdi, Mao Tse Tung, Ginger Rogers and John Lennon are among the
interviewees, whilst interviewers include Tom Driberg, Truman Capote,
Djuna Barnes and Alistair Cooke. Notable pairings are: Josef Stalin
interviewed by H.G. Wells, Joseph Heller interviewed by Mel Brooks - and
Oscar Wilde by himself.

Umberto Eco (1932 – 2016)
❖ an Italian novelist, literary
critic, philosopher, semiotician,
and university professor
❖ Eco also wrote academic texts,
children's books, and essays.
❖ He was the founder of the
Department of Media Studies
at the University of the
Republic of San Marino.

Novels
★ Foucault's Pendulum
★ The Island of the Day Before
★ The Prague Cemetery
★ The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
★ Numero Zero

Private Eye - published in London
❖ a British fortnightly satirical and current affairs news
magazine, founded in 1961
❖ is Britain's best-selling current affairs magazine
❖ is widely recognised for its prominent criticism and
lampooning of public figures
❖ It is also known for its in-depth investigative journalism
into under-reported scandals and cover-ups

Vanity Fair
★ a magazine of popular culture,
fashion, and current affairs
published in the United States.
★ The ﬁrst version of Vanity Fair was
published from 1913 to 1936.
★ The imprint was revived in 1983
and currently includes ﬁve
international editions of the
magazine.
★ As of 2018, the Editor-in-Chief is
Radhika Jones.

The Interview.pdf

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