Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Book reviews - Judit Ágnes Kádár: Zoltán Abádi-Nagy: Világregény— Regényvilág: Amerikai íróinterjúk (The Novel of the World—The World of the Novel: Conversations with American Writers.)

other interviews, however, the flow of conversation is not broken since footnotes enrich the text economically. Interestingly, the author shares his doubts with us regarding his quest for the most suitable approach to certain issues; his 'professional elegance' provides a delicate balance between what we can learn from the novelist's own views and what further background materials may add to our understanding of the prose texts. As for the scope of questions, inevitably they all had been elaborated finely. The author deliberately excluded those issues that had already been discussed elsewhere earlier, with the aim of formulating some kind of a complex unity of comprehension of a particular writer's literary output, providing further insight into the context of the novelist's ouvre as well as to some major tendencies in American literature, clarifying the notions of post-modernism, making distinctions between various sub-trends in realism, modernism and post-modernism. At the same time Abádi-Nagy's questions are very economically designed and delicately structured. This pre-set structure allows the interviewer to present some order as well as to let some freedom work throughout the conversation, enabling the participants to develop further points spontaneously. This playfulness does not ruin the overall efficiency of the conversations but rather adds some kind of a personal touch that may color the reader's impression of the writer. Based on his profound knowledge and critical understanding of the texts in question as well as the critical context of the novelist's work, the interviewer anticipates certain sub-tendencies that the novelist may or may not feel akin with, but certainly responses and locates himself in or against that (e.g. Sukenick's views on formalist versus visionary approaches to literature 199). However, the careful clarification of distinctions, sometimes incorporated in the body of the questions and occasionally developed in the course of the dialogue with the given novelist enables us to obtain a precise panoramic view of various artistic approaches to the problem of mimetic versus nonmimetic functions/technique of writing (e.g. Sukenick interview 184, 187), or the triangle of the writer/reality/reader, take Federman's views on fact/fiction/reader (233), as he claims: Én nem azért írok, hogy hűen ábrázoljam az életet. Jobban érdekel a viszony, a kölcsönös játék köztem meg a valóság közt. Az érdekel, 211