Alexia: Our ignorance about the lives of so many novelists is unfortunate. How much deeper and more complete our appreciation of their works would be if we knew more about the personal wellsprings of their thought and art! Malik: I disagree. Because we know virtually nothing of their personal lives, we can resist the temptation to reduce consideration of their works to biography and psychoanalysis, and instead engage each work on its own artistic terms. The dialogue provides the most support for the claim that Alexia and Malik disagree over whether ['understanding the personal wellsprings of the work of certain novelists is impossible without knowledge of their lives', "knowledge about a novelist's personal life can interfere with the appropriate understanding of that novelist's work", "a psychoanalytic approach provides an inadequate method of understanding a novelist's life", "a novelist's work is not influenced by the details of his or her personal life"]