Thinking-with-others: David Scott, the stance of criticism, and the interview

ABSTRACT

This article reconstructs David Scott’s theory of the interview. It draws on Scott’s scholarly writing, as well as the prefaces and interviews he has conducted with Caribbean intellectuals in Small Axe, which he founded and edits. Scott argues for the interview as a way to avoid corrosive critique, instead emphasizing receptivity and listening to reconstruct and clarify cultural and intellectual history. Interviews offer an alternative form of criticism, and Scott’s advocacy of them adds a new dimension to the debate over the value of critique versus surface reading. Scott introduces the concept of “problem-spaces” to understand the situation each generation of intellectuals has faced – notably for him, in the anglophone Caribbean. Interviews provide a distinctive genre to understand those problem-spaces and the different cultural, historical, and political senses that each generation carries. Just as Scott presents the interview as a mode to “think-with-others”, this article tries to think with Scott.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical interviews
• literary interview
• critique
• surface reading
• David Scott
• Stuart Hall

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Jeffrey Williams

Jeffrey Williams is professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University. He writes on contemporary fiction, the history of modern criticism and theory, and critical university studies. He has also published more than 80 long-form interviews with critics, writers, philosophers, and editors. He has published seven books; his How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture (Fordham, 2014) draws on interviews and aims for a public criticism, and he is an editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (3rd ed., 2018).