Friday, October 10, 2014
The Art and Science of the Interview
WRIT 1133: The Art and Science of the Interview--I have no frame for this yet, no mock course description, just the idea that an 1133 might be centered entirely around this idea. Essentially, I'm posting this now only as a way to force myself to flesh out the idea in the next couple of days...
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This could be very cool, especially if the class ends up listening to WTF for 10 weeks. . . .
ReplyDeleteI wonder: What was the first interview? Not counting law-related variations, like depositions, etc. Could one open up a copy of The Spectator in 1840, say, to find an extended interview with Dickens?
Anyway, looking forward to hearing more.
John's reference to Dickens set me to thinking of the poet Homer and the scene in the Iliad where three men go to interview/interrogate the celebrity Achilles about why he is abstaining from fighting or even Horatio interviewing Hamlet about how he escaped his banishment from Denmark on that ship. These are, of course, literary moments, but then such literary things interest me. But, now, I am also thinking of Ted Conover's response to my question about revealing that you are a writer as you go about investigating a topic and talking with people, about how he said that, if he met a person at a bus stop, he might interview them and he hoped, if he knew the interview was to be printed and if he knew that readers might recognize the interviewee, he would have told the person at the bus stop that he was a writer and this was an interview moment. He said he "hoped he would have told the person at the bus stop," but he did not say he always told them. So I guess, just to think around this topic, I'm wondering about clandestine interviewers or brazen TMZ-styled forced interviews-on-the-spot or "branded" Barbara Walters-this-will-make-you-cry-because-Barbara-does-that-in-her-interviews or even media interviews which push to a level of painful absurdity as per CNN when, given a tragedy, the interviewer asks, "So, how did receiving the telephone call with the news that your son was on the Malaysian plane that dropped out of the sky make you feel?" Pardon this stew of associations. This is just to say I find the topic quite rich.
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