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Winnie the Pooh Store - Postmodern Pooh (Rethinking Theory)
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List Price: $19.95
Our Price: $12.21
Your Save: $ 7.74 ( 39% )
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Manufacturer: Northwestern University Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780810123847
ISBN: 0810123843
Label: Northwestern University Press
Manufacturer: Northwestern University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 192
Publication Date: 2006-08-17
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Studio: Northwestern University Press
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Hilarious
Comment: "Postmodern Pooh" is even funnier than Crews' earlier spoof, "The Pooh Perplex." As a graduate student, I especially enjoyed it as an antidote to some of the drivel I've been assigned to read. This is smart, serious parody -- exaggerated, but not much. The lousy puns and random coincidences tarted up as profound insights are absolutely typical of postmodern academic writing. The spoof of "Body Theory" especially tickled me, as that line of theory is alive and kicking currently in academia. And in addition to the satire on postmodernism there is the hilarious spoof of Harold Bloom, who really is as arrogant and bullying as he is portrayed here under the disguise of "Orlando Bruno." Sadly, the preposterous quotations by which the fictional writers in this book appeal to academic authority are REAL and are published by the university presses of Yale, Duke, Oxford, etc., and these real quotations are, if anything, sillier than the made-up writings of the made-up authors.
Any graduate student who hates "theory" will love this book.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: From 'gynocritical discourse' to 'QueerCultStudLitCrit' : a hilarious spoof.
Comment: Full disclosure: As far as Winnie the Pooh is concerned, I'm in Dorothy Parker's camp. I think it's nauseatingly cutesy dreck that condescends to children. But that's neither here nor there, because the target in "Postmodern Pooh" is not Pooh. In this sequel to his earlier book, "The Pooh Perplex", Crews instead takes aim at various current fads in academic literary criticism, using Pooh as a vehicle. This is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, but the results are hilarious.
The book purports to be the proceedings of a forum on Winnie-the-Pooh at the Modern Language Association's annual convention. Crews takes devastating aim at the whole bunch, including, but not limited to:
Deconstructionism
Poststructuralist Marxism
Radical Feminism (gynocritical theory)
New Historicism
Postcolonialism
Sociobiological Analysis
QueerCultStudLitCrit
the Woolf wrote Milne school
Crews gets the different factions dead to rights:
"As for 'the reader', spare me! The term elides difference, attempts to inscribe on a bubbling bouillabaisse of potentialities one model of a stolid, passive, tabula rasa receptor."
"As you've seen, the Colonized Unconscious has already had its way with both Pooh and Milne, turning their backbones to Yorkshire pudding."
"And it's suggestive, to say the least, that the record of satanic cult activity in Milne's England of the twenties appears to have been very carefully and completely effaced."
The book will probably be funniest (or most tragic) to academics who actually have to navigate the sordid back alleys of lit crit to ensure their professional survival. But there is plenty to amuse the general reader as well.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Just as brilliant as its predecessor, but less amusing
Comment: 38 years is a long time to pass between publication of a successful book and that of its sequel, and lovers of The Pooh Perplex must have feared that it would be last they would read of Frederick Crews's parodies of different styles of literary criticism as applied to the works of A. A. Milne. Nonetheless, the book written in the early years of his career at Berkeley has been followed with another written when he was on the verge of retirement.
Postmodernism did not exist in the early 1960s, nor did radical feminism; even ordinary sane feminism was not much heard of. On the other hand Freudian psychoanalysis was much more prominent then than it is now. The targets of Crews's parodies have accordingly changed over the years, but the accuracy of his shots has not, and the new series of articles is as brilliant as the first. They are less amusing to read, however, probably because some of the modern fads threaten a wider public. The victims of psychoanalysis were for the most part willing victims, but the victims of therapists who claim to recover lost memories of childhood abuse can include almost anyone.
Crews is careful to document the fashionable nonsense that he attributes to his lightly fictionalized authors. For readers who doubt, for example, whether Jacques Derrida and his followers could seriously have proposed that apartheid in South Africa was a consequence of phonetic writing which, "by isolating and hypostasizing being, ... corrupts it into a quasi-ontological segregation", he supplies a reference to the original article. Likewise for many other examples.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not for everyone.
Comment: If, on the other hand, you are a member of the target audience (those who've been subjected to Academic Literary Criticism and who find the pretentious idiocy rampant in such to be anywhere between annoying and amusing) then this is definitely a five-star book for you. For anyone who picks it up because they enjoy "Winnie The Pooh", and figure anything that relates to that favorite should be a good read, but who HASN'T plenty of experience dealing with literary criticism, it will be fairly hard going, and much of the humor will be lost as they won't recognize the schools of academic thought being pilloried.
Customer Rating:
Summary: True, all too true
Comment: Correct me if I'm wrong. Chapter 1: FELICIA MARRONNEZ = Derrida; Chapter 2: VICTOR S. FASSELL = Foucault; Chapter 3: CARLA GULAG: Fredric Jameson; Chapter 4: SISERA CATHETER = radical feminism (Brownmiller?); Chapter 5: ORPHEUS BRUNO = the one and only Harold Bloom; Chapter 6: DAT NUFFA DAT = Edward Said; Chapter 7: RENEE FRANCIS = envionmental criticism; DOLORES MALATESTA = pop psychology; Chapter 9: BIGGLORIA3 = studies in popular culture; Chaper 10 DUDLEY CRAVAT III = a cross between Roger Kimball and William F. Buckley; Chapter 11: N. MACK HOBBS = Richard Rorty???
Simply the best piece of satire since ... well, since The Pooh Perplex.
Sid Cundiff
s.cundiff@att.net
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Editorial Reviews:
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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.
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