The Significance of the Title

The single, plain title The Interview is deliberately broad, because the lesson is about the interview in two senses at once. First, it names the form — the journalistic practice that Christopher Silvester examines in Part I, weighing its history, its ethics and its worth. Second, it names a specific instance of that form — Mukund Padmanabhan's actual interview with Umberto Eco in Part II. The title therefore points both to the idea of the interview and to a real, living example of it, so that theory and practice sit under one heading. …