Page-99 test
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The Page 99 test is a method for evaluating literature . Any book is opened to page 99 and judged on the basis of its content.
history
The method goes back to a sentence by the American writer William Gass :
"Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you."
"Open the book on page 99 and read, and the quality of it will be revealed to you."
Gass used the phrase in 1991 in his collection of essays, Fifty Literary Pillars , which appeared in the book A Temple of Texts in 2006 . He attributes the invention of the method to the British literary critic Ford Madox Ford and notes that the writer Wyndham Lewis has also claimed the authorship. There is no such passage in either Ford or Lewis' writings. Although Gass' book was widely discussed in American literary criticism in 2006, the test was only mentioned in a review in the Washington Examiner . The reviewer criticized the fact that the test only worked for gimmicky texts. It is not without reason that Gass' canon did not include authors such as Jane Austen , George Eliot , Thackeray , Hardy , Dostoyevsky or Turgenev who did not pass the test. Since the start of the English blog test 2007, the method has been attributed to Ford. Blog founder Marshal Zeringue pointed out in 2014 that the source was not proven.
Page 69 test
Before Zeringue started the blog test in March 2007 , he had described the "test" in a blog post in 2006 and started the blog of the same name in February 2007. In March 2007 he started the blog test . The "test" is attributed to the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan . In 1989, in his biography The Medium and the Messenger , Philip Marchand described his reading method for a Page 69 test:
“To determine whether a book was worth reading, he usually looked at page 69 of the work, plus the adjacent page and the table of contents. If the author gave no promise of insight or worthwhile information on page 69, McLuhan reasoned, the book was probably not worth reading. If he decided the book did merit his attention, he started by reading only the left hand pages. "
There is no description of the test in McLuhan's writings. Marchand explains the technique with McLuhan's interest in fast reading . In 1967 he attended a course on the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics program.
Distribution in Germany
In Germany, the method uses the online literary magazine tell, founded in 2016, with the comment that the test does not replace a review . Among other things, the critic Sieglinde Geisel and the translator Frank Heibert write articles according to the method and test them on canonical authors such as Peter Handke , Christian Kracht and Michel Houellebecq . The author of the test, William Gass, is also represented with a novel. The possibilities and limits of the test are debated.
Web links
Research on the origin of the test
Individual evidence
- ^ William H. Gass: A Temple of Texts . 2010, p. 50 .
- ^ A Temple of Texts - William H. Gass. Retrieved December 3, 2019 .
- ↑ Turn on the Gass. September 25, 2006, accessed December 2, 2019 .
- ↑ Marshal Zeringue: The Page 99 Test: R. John Williams's "The Buddha in the Machine". In: The Page 99 Test. August 6, 2014, accessed December 3, 2019 .
- ↑ Marshal Zeringue: Campaign for the American Reader: The page test 69th In: Campaign for the American Reader. August 31, 2006, accessed December 3, 2019 .
- ↑ Marshal Zeringue: Campaign for the American Reader: Is 99 the new 69? In: Campaign for the American Reader. March 5, 2007, accessed December 3, 2019 .
- ^ Philip Marchand: Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger . 1989, p. 129 .
- ^ Page 99 test. In: tell. Accessed December 2, 2019 (German).
- ^ Page 98 test: William H. Gass. In: tell. January 23, 2017, accessed on December 2, 2019 (German).
- ↑ Where does the Page 99 test reach its limits? In: tell. September 13, 2016, accessed on December 2, 2019 (German).