Postmodern Pooh - Hardcover

Frederick Crews

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0865476268 ISBN 13: 9780865476264

Publisher: North Point Press, 2001

Synopsis

A sequel of sorts to the classic (and bestselling) sendup of literary criticism, The Pooh Perplex

Thirty-seven years ago, a slim parody of academic literary criticism called The Pooh Perplex became a surprise bestseller. Now Frederick Crews has written a hilarious new satire in the same vein. Purporting to be the proceedings of a forum on Pooh convened at the Modern Language Association's annual convention, Postmodern Pooh brilliantly parodies the academic fads and figures that hold sway at the millennium.

Deconstruction, poststructuralist Marxism, new historicism, radical feminism, cultural studies, recovered-memory theory, and postcolonialism, among other methods, take their shots at the poor teddy bear and Crews takes his shots at them. The fun lies in seeing just how much adulteration Pooh can stand.

About this title

About the Author

Frederick Crews is Professor Emeritus of English at University of California, Berkeley. In addition to The Pooh Perplex, he is the author of The Memory Wars and other books about psychology.

From the Inside Flap

"Hilarious and accurate. Crews has made the punishment fit the crime." --Joan Acocella

"Frederick Crews is a Person of Very Great Brain. What he pooh-Poohs deserves it. Reading this book actually makes me grateful that I toil in the jargon-choked field of psychology instead of the impenetrably murky caverns of literary criticism. But literary criticism is luckier than psychology: it has Frederick Crews to light the way." --Carol Tavris, author of The Mismeasure of Woman

"Postmodern Pooh is an astonishing book: hilarious, deliciously cruel, and intellectually stimulating." --Denis Dutton, Editor, Arts & Letters Daily

Reviews

In 1964, a young English professor at Berkeley published The Pooh Perplex, a slim academic satire purporting to collect a dozen critical essays on Winnie-the-Pooh. Insightful and searingly funny, it took academia by storm and gave the humanities a much-needed poke in the ribs. Little known then, Crews would become a highly influential cultural critic, whose humor and clarity leaven many books more serious than Pooh. Now, concluding a "long if uneventful career of devotion to humanistic values and to Pooh," Crews has issued a sequel, which is, if possible, more trenchant and hilarious than the original. This is partly circumstantial, the English Lit profession having become more self-parodying than ever. In 11 sham essays (complete with footnotes of brilliantly chosen actual texts), Crews takes on deconstruction, queer theory, gender/body studies, postcolonial studies, chaos theory, etc. His genius lies in details, like the "stochastic teddy bear descent rate" chart in the gene-theory paper and the Marxist professor with a "cross-departmental chair at Duke as Joe Camel Professor of Child Development." Crews steers largely clear of ethnic studies, reserving his finest shots for the Freudian and post-Freudian pretensions he has been dismantling for most of his career. Insiders will readily recognize ‚minences grises like Harold Bloom and Stanley Fish, broadly caricatured. Occasionally, Crews falls somewhat wide of the mark. But in general his touch is too deft to be mean-spirited, and should be welcomed by a profession famous for its need and ability to laugh at itself. This small volume should be required reading for the 30,000 members of the MLA and any other bemused spectators of the academic fishbowl.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Crews (English, emeritus, Berkeley) recently created controversy with his book-length invective against Freudianism, The Memory Wars. For this updated version of his wildly popular lampooning of literary criticism, The Pooh Perplex, published almost four decades ago, Crews sinks his fangs into more recent movements, such as deconstructionism, new historicism, radical feminism, trauma studies, postcolonialism, and cybercriticism. The book gathers papers from a fictional panel on Pooh at the Modern Language Association's annual convention, all written by Crews and garnished with footnotes that allow the bathos and muddled thinking in some actual scholarship to speak for itself. But like a gang of sorcerer's apprentices, Crews's targets often wriggle free of their creator's grasp and endow his satire with some of the passion, eloquence, and wit that has earned them their following. Although his animus against Freud knows no bounds, Crews eschews cynicism and ideological agendas as ringmaster of this learned Cage aux folles, magnanimously skewering radicals and archconservatives alike. Crews's obvious pleasure in letting a stuffed bear show up those critics who have clearly kept him reading for years will keep anyone interested in literary scholarship in stitches. Recommended for larger public and all academic libraries. Ulrich Baer, New York Univ.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When Crews wrote his surprise best-seller, The Pooh Perplex, JFK was president, and most college English departments were rather calm and civil places. Still, Perplex won readers by applying that era's conflicting modes of literary criticism to A. A. Milne's classic children's book. Imagine, then, the potential for belly laughs when a new panel of academics, culture-war veterans, takes on the Bear. Winnie and friends encounter a wide variety of "theory," including deconstruction, poststructuralist Marxism, new historicism, radical feminism, cultural studies, recovered-memory theory, and postcolonialism. Consider the names of Crews' "contributors": Victor S. Fassell, for example, or Sisera Catheter. Some essays' titles are bloated with jargon (e.g., "late-capitalist metanarrative," "gene/meme covariation"); others are brief and to the point ("Just Lack a Woman," "Resident Aliens," "The Importance of Being Portly"). Cast as presentations at a Modern Language Association convention, each essay opens with a brief biography of its "author," and most "presenters" are highly critical of the speakers who preceded them. Likely to entertain readers who wrestled with these theories in college. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: North Point Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865476268
• ISBN 13: 9780865476264
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160