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 post-colonialism, 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.
"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
"Hilarious and accurate. Crews has made the punishment fit the crime."
