A history of the questionnaire from its inception in the late 19th century to its current online renaissance, surveying a wide range of fields and forms in order to ask questions about the questions we ask ourselves.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Questionnaires are everywhere: we fill them out at doctors' offices and at job interviews, to express ourselves and to advance knowledge, to find love and to kill time. But where did they come from, and why have they proliferated? Evan Kindley's Questionnaire investigates the history of "the form as form," from the Victorian confession album to the BuzzFeed quiz. By asking questions about the questions we ask ourselves, Kindley uncovers surprising connections between literature and science, psychology and business, and journalism and surveillance.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Introduction: The Form as Form1. Private Publicity2. The Rise and Fall of Testing3. Your Opinion of You4. The Art of Asking5. Pandora's Checklist6. Dating and Data7. Quiz ManiaAcknowledgmentsEndnotesIndex
A marvelous book that gathers an unexpected array of materials under the heading of the questionnaire: from IQ tests to the early days of marriage counseling, from data-mining Facebook quizzes to Scientology's rigged personality tests. Playful, smart and rich with dizzying connections, Evan Kindley's Questionnaire is no less than a secret history of how we became a nation of oversharers. Hua Hsu, author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (2016); Contributor, The New Yorker; Associate Professor of English, Vassar College, USA
Evan Kindley is Senior Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and Visiting Instructor in the Literature Department at Claremont McKenna College, USA. He has published essays and reviews in n+1, the London Review of Books, Dissent, Bookforum, the New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times.
Über den Autor
Evan Kindley is Founding Editor and Editor at Large at the Los Angeles Review of Books and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Claremont McKenna College, USA. His selected journalistic publications include essays and reviews in n+1, the London Review of Books, Dissent, Bookforum, The New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times. His academic publications articles in Critical Inquiry, ELH, and PMLA, as well as a chapter in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Introduction: The Form as Form
1. Private Publicity
2. The Rise and Fall of Testing
3. Your Opinion of You
4. The Art of Asking
5. Pandora's Checklist
6. Dating and Data
7. Quiz Mania
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Index
Klappentext
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Questionnaires are everywhere: we fill them out at doctors' offices and at job interviews, to express ourselves and to advance knowledge, to find love and to kill time. But where did they come from, and why have they proliferated? Evan Kindley's Questionnaire investigates the history of "the form as form," from the Victorian confession album to the BuzzFeed quiz. By asking questions about the questions we ask ourselves, Kindley uncovers surprising connections between literature and science, psychology and business, and journalism and surveillance.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Provides a sort of archaeology of the present moment, accounting for some familiar forms (such as the online personality quiz) that readers may not have thought to consider historically
