morituri te salutant the mediatization of the literary last interview at the turn of the twenty-first century anneleen masschelein Since the last decades of the twentieth century, an increasing number of "last interviews," conducted with celebrities just before their deaths, have been appearing in print, audiovisual, and digital media. The internet has greatly contributed to their continued life cycle on platforms like Open Culture and YouTube. In 2004, Melville House Books, a small Brooklyn press founded by sculptor Valerie Merians and writer Dennis Johnson, launched a book series titled the Last Interview with subjects ranging from Martin Luther King to Hannah Arendt, Lou Reed, David Foster Wallace, and Jacques Derrida, with whom the series started (Masschelein et al., "The Literary Interview" 32; Maunsell 42).1 The popularity and commodification of the last interview in contemporary popular culture can be read as a symptom of, but also as contributing to, a shift in the culture of dying away from the "sequestration of death" that dominated the mid-twentieth century (Giddens 161-62; Certeau 190-95). Recording devices (especially smartphones) have made their way to the deathbed. Moreover, in the Western world, death is more than ever anticipated and prepared for. As a result, new artes moriendi, descriptions of good ways of dying, may be needed. The international acclaim of bestsellers like Katie Roiphe's The Violent Hour, which describes the deaths of a number of authors, contributes to the idea that the death of the author seems to be an exemplary cultural trope to make ways of dying visible.2 In what follows, I will take a closer look at the last interview with a dying author as a subgenre of the literary interview. This analysis entails looking at the use of specific "literarizing" strategies that are used, depending on the medium, to see how the last interview is linked not just to a legacy but also to authorship.
