The Role and Function of Author Interviews in the Contemporary Anglophone Literary Field

As my title suggests, this article examines interviews with authors today. While the phrase "author interview" might connote the highly-edited examples of the Paris Review "Art of Fiction" series or an onstage interview at a literary festival, I want to begin with an extreme contemporary example. In 2016 a new service for authors, publishers, and agents launched, promising to automate the author interview. With "AuthorBot"

[a]uthors can answer reader queries, and chat with multiple readers in their own words—without adding to author time commitment or cost.

Our chatbots create an authentic conversation with readers using AI, NLP and guided elements. Authors can also jump into conversations to support book tours or conduct an AMA—with revenue opportunities on physical sales, ebooks and merchandise.¹

An example of a "chatbot," "chatterbot," or "conversational agent," AuthorBot is a computer program designed to simulate human conversation. It is only the latest incarnation of a much longer endeavour to perfect interpersonal communication with the aid of the latest technology (we could trace its lineage back from Alexa and Siri, via Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA and the Mechanical Turk, to Pygmalion's Galatea). What is unusual is the use to which the chatbot is being put here—namely, an author interview. Generally conceived to be the product of a spontaneous, revelatory, face-to-face conversation with an autonomous subject, the author interview would seem to be the obverse of what can be automated. Yet AuthorBot collapses this distinction, premising itself on both maintaining the appeal of that particular author–reader interaction, while rendering it more efficient thanks to technological augmentation and reduction of author involvement.

Technophobes' groans aside, AuthorBot offers us a fascinating entry point for examining the interactive role and function of the author in the contemporary literary sphere. In attempting to automate the author interview (and to sell this strategy to the publishing industry²) AuthorBot tries to tap into a wider perception that readers today desire intimate, authentic interactions with an author—a perception fuelled in part by the big rise in literary festivals, author readings, platform interviews and the like: what we might call collectively "live literature."³ It also acknowledges that these interactions—live literature included—are increasingly mediated via computational technologies in the era of digital media and "platformed sociality."⁴ In this respect the decision by the designers of AuthorBot to replicate the author interview is a savvy one: as I argue in my book Literature and the Rise of the Interview, interviews have historically mediated conversation, while promising communicational immediacy. In so doing they have offered a paradoxical dream of face-to-face communication for a mass mediated culture.⁵ Even before AuthorBot attempted to automate the author, interviews were deployed as a means to mediate and manage mass communication.

Expanding on the curious case of AuthorBot, this article seeks to acknowledge the role that author interviews play in the construction and maintenance of a contemporary Anglophone literary sphere. In doing so, I build on the arguments put forth in my book, which examines author interviews and interviewing culture in Britain and America since the mid-nineteenth century. There, I argue that attending to the shifting and multifaceted deployment of interviews—both as form and method—has much to tell us about historical conceptions of authorship, publics, inscription technologies, and reading practices, among other things. Interviews mediate between authors and publics, helping to construct both. They have also helped to promote two, largely oppositional, versions of subjectivity in modernity: one the highly constructed and privileged interviewee; the other, an effaced, de-privileged interviewer, whose personhood is often discounted.⁶ The author interview's mediating function is not neutral, whatever its association with automation (and whatever the tech industry) might imply.⁷

One significant example of this is the author interview's championing of a purportedly autonomous authorial subject within the wider market. In Literature and the Creative Economy Sarah Brouillette traces the implications of the ideology of the "creative industries" (first proposed by Richard Florida and championed by Britain's "New Labour" government after [End...