“Do You Use a Pencil or a Pen?”: Author Interviews as Literary Advice

This chapter examines the relationship between author interviews and literary advice across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It draws on case studies in the form of two interview series: the interwar “How Writers Work” series, published in the British periodical Everyman, and the “Art of Fiction” series, published in the American magazine The Paris Review from 1953 onward. It also discusses the explosion of author interviews in the era of online media. The chapter argues that the author interview is an expansive form, encouraging readers of all types to bring their own agendas and reading styles to the text, including but not limited to reading for advice. The very ambiguity of the relationship between author interviews and literary advice has in fact worked in the former’s favor: enabling it to gain both popularity and prestige in an era of professionalized literary studies.

‘What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?’ Betrayal and the Feminist Ethics of Aesthetic Involvement

The #MeToo movement has put a spotlight on sexual harassment and abuse in a number of industries, notably the arts. It has raised a set of questions about how to receive the artistic works of the accused, particularly when such work has been beloved or formative for an individual, and collectively when it has cultural significance and influence. Claire Dederer, writing in The Paris Review, posed the question bluntly in her piece, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” This question, and the range of (often perplexed) responses to it, reveal the lack of adequate resources to evaluate responses to an artist’s actions that may bear on our aesthetic valuations of the artist’s work and that may be experienced as quite intimately personal. What do we do with the sense of betrayal that may follow on the discovery of an artist’s bad behavior? What are the implications of consuming of such art? What concepts and norms might help to guide reflection? These questions bear on the ethical significance of love and appreciation for artworks and artists, and, more broadly, the ethical consumption of artworks. This paper responds to these questions in two ways: first, it develops an account of “aesthetic involvement” to elaborate the sense of betrayal that may follow accusations or revelations of sexual harassment and abuse. Second, it proposes a feminist ethics of aesthetic involvement in response to such betrayals and to dilemmas about the individual and collective ethical consumption of artworks.

Generational Trauma and the Crisis of Après-Coup In Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoirs

This essay suggests that Bechdel’s two autographic memoirs are indicative of the potential that exists in graphic narrative to provoke new dialogues with regard to how we approach, how we interpret, and how we interact with generational and familial trauma that stems from dysfunctional relationships with parental figures. Specifically, it examines how Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? builds upon the juxtapositions of the father-daughter bond in Fun Home by shifting the focus towards Bechdel’s traumatic relationship with her mother. This chapter argues that by explicitly weaving the narrative around a backdrop of psychology and psychoanalysis (D. W. Winnicott, Freud, Jung, and Lacan), Bechdel intentionally situates the “reader in the position of the analyst” (as quoted in The Paris Review). Drawing on Bechdel’s theory-rich content, this essay examines the figure of the mother as a shifting entity that mutates and molds itself onto substitute transitional objects and experiences, including Bechdel’s therapists and romantic attachments. Alternating among transcribed audio dialogues, diary entries, counseling sessions, dreams, letters, photographs, and memories, Are You My Mother? is an illustration of the Freudian concept of “afterwardness,” or, as Lacan coined it, après-coup—a retroactive understanding and re-visitation of earlier trauma.

DAVIS, Lydia. Nem vem. Tradução de Branca Vianna. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2017. 126 p.

Nem vem (Companhia das Letras, 2017), traduzido por Vianna, é o terceiro livro da autora traduzido no Brasil. Publicado pela primeira vez em 2014, em Nova Iorque, pela editora Farrar, Straus & Giroux, é uma antologia de textos lançados anteriormente, com poucas alterações, em importantes periódicos, como Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times e The Paris Review. A norte-americana Lydia Davis, nascida em 1947, é uma escritora, tradutora e professora de escrita criativa da Universidade de Albany, NY. Especialista na tradução da literatura francesa para o inglês, traduziu Flaubert, Proust e Jouve, além de ter ganhado o French-American Foundation Translation Prize de 2003, por sua tradução de No caminho de Swann, de Proust. Entre suas obras ficcionais estão o romance O fim da história (José Olympio, 2016) e quatro antologias de histórias curtas, dentre as quais está Tipos de perturbação (Companhia das Letras, 2013). Em 2013, ganhou o Man Booker Prize, pelo conjunto de sua obra. Davis é apontada como uma renovadora da prosa de língua inglesa e uma das precursoras da escrita de narrativas curtas (as chamadas flash fictions) e inclassificáveis, próximas da poesia e da reflexão metafísica. Branca Vianna é linguista, tradutora, intérprete e professora da PUC-Rio. Bacharel em Letras e especialista em Interpretação Simultânea (ambos pela PUC-Rio), mestre em Linguística (University College London) e mestre em Formação de Intérpretes (Université de Genève). Traduziu duas obras de Lydia Davis para a Companhia das Letras (Tipos de Perturbação e Nem vem).

Legacies of Impersonality

The fifth chapter examines the roles of interviewer and interviewee, exploring debates around objectivity and personality in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was a period in which these roles came under pressure, partly as a reaction against the interrogative interviewing that dominated in previous decades. Drawing on the famed series of interviews in The Paris Review and the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and colleagues, the chapter illustrates how the interview emerged as a site where authors could discuss those topics such as methodology, market orientation, and intention that had been largely dismissed by New Criticism. These writers and publications, while beholden to a canonical modernist tradition, reject this older conception of the interview. In so doing, they enabled the interview to be conceived by authors, including ageing modernists, as an aesthetically and critically engaged activity in an age of celebrity authorship.

THE MIRROR OF SENSIBILITY: STYLE AND TRUMAN CAPOTE IN BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S

Em entrevista para The Paris Review, em 1957, o escritor americano Truman Capote revela idéias sobre estilo literário que serão aplicadas em uma de suas obras mais conhecidas, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, de 1958. A precisão e a objetividade utilizadas para escrever essa obra abrem caminho para seu projeto posterior, In Cold Blood, de 1965, onde o estilo jornalístico tem como objetivo revelar da forma mais neutra possível a “verdade” dos fatos. Tiffany’s, ainda, demonstra a habilidade de Capote para a descrição mais exata de seus personagens, ao mesmo tempo em que desvela a cidade de Nova York a partir dos olhos de um escritor encantado com o que ele descreve como sendo “a única verdadeira cidade que existe.”