Postmodern Pooh - Hardcover

Fred 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 fields of psychology instead of the impenetrably murky caverns of literary criticism. But literary criticism is luckier than psychology: It has Fred Crews to light the way. (Carol Tavris)

Postmodern Pooh is the funniest and most incisive [satire on literary criticism] to date. Using a blend of acute imitation and with frequent reference to respected critical texts, Crews demonstrates that despite the purported differences between recent schools of critical thought, all of them have a tendency to use digression, sexual and scatalogical obsession, self-conscious erudition and irrelevant quotation to distract the reader from the emptiness of their argument ...The only comparable publication, for both satirical acuity and hilarity, is the infamous hoax paper that the physicist Alan Sokal published. (The TLS)

A brilliant and savagely witty skewering of the combatants on all sides of the academic culture wars (The Washington Post)

One of the funniest books I have read this year. (Roger Scruton New Statesman)

Nearly 40 years ago a young literary scholar by the name of Frederick Crews had an inspired idea: to portray his trendsetting peers in the act of applying their critical acumen to the adventures of that deceptively simpleminded teddy bear of storybook fame, Winnie-the-Pooh. Now Winnie-the-Pooh is three-quarters of a century old - and, alas, Professor Crews lags not far behind. Thanks, however, to the efforts of Princeton's superstar professor N. Mack Hobbs, Crews has been coaxed out of retirement long enough to lend his blessing and his name to a project undertaken in homage to his own - a panel on Pooh convened at the Modern Language Association convention in Washington, DC, at which leading lights of contemporary criticism were invited to train their wits upon the beloved bear. Radical feminist Sisera Catheter, Lacanian postcolonialist Das Nuffa Dat, and trailblazing proponents of Deconstruction, Poststructuralist Marxism, New Historicism, Biopoetics, Cultural Studies and - let us not forget - recovered memory theory, all took their turns at the podium and their shots at dear Edward Bear, leaving no ammunition in the arsenal of contemporary litery hermeneutics unexploded. Here, then, are the published proceedings of this remarkable event, for the edification (and delectation) of a new generation of readers.