Rating: 
Summary: Essential reading
Review: To be fair, let me say at the outset that the author has been my friend and colleague for many years. I am sure, however, that I would feel exactly as I do about this book if I had never laid eyes on Fred Crews. Thirty-eight years ago, when The Pooh Perplex was published, literary criticism was a harmless activity produced largely by academics with one intellectual obsession or another (such as Freudian analysis or Marxist world-views), or by followers of easily parodied methodologies such as the self-styled New Criticsm. In the years since much has changed. The study of literature occupies a much smaller place in the colleges and universities than it did, but paradoxically, rather than banding together to save the humanities in a world less interested in their subject, academic critics have all too often split into warring camps of Taliban-like true believers, each coterie proclaiming its own often unintelligible, jargon-ridden, and preposterous ideology. What most of such schools of criticism share, under the name of what they agree to call "Theory," is a new sense that you can say anything you want if it is outrageous and pretentious enough. Many of these writers argue that there is no real world anyway, just what one perceives, so the old limits are gone.An outraged sense of the culture-destroying impact of such nonsense underlies the parodies in Postmodern Pooh. The essays are--though it's almost impossible to believe anything could be--funnier than those in The Pooh Perplex. An example is Chapter Three, "The Fissured Subtext: Historical Problematics, the Absolute Cause, Transcoded Contradictions, and Late-Capitalist Metanarrative (in Pooh)", by a fire-eating revolutionary who holds "the cross-departmental chair. . . at Duke as Joe Camel Professor of Child Development." The persona of the ridiculous Ms. Gulag gives Crews the opportunity to quote highly respected and successful academics who still see Stalin and Mao as gentle forces for good, even for good sex. And here, as throughout the book, the footnotes citing real publications are astonishing, sometimes almost too horrible to be funny: a fictitious analyst of a passage in Pooh will make a dumb claim, and Crews will pretend to support it in a footnote by quoting an even dumber comment by a real critic, with chapter and verse identified. Another politically oriented writer, a Calcutta native wonderfully named Das Nuffa Dat, provides parodies of other involuted critics whose methods, applied to interpreting the toy bear, give us hours of laughter as the emperors' clothes disappear. And so it goes with such eminences as Stanley Fish and Harold Bloom, with hardline feminists, nonsensical Derrideans and Lacanians, semioticians, and many more. Begin with the first presentation, "Why? Wherefore? Inasmuch as Which?" by the Sea and Ski Professor of English at the University of California at Irvine (her prizewinning dissertation was on "Heidegger Reading Pooh Reading Hegel Reading Husserl: Or, Isn't it Punny How a Hun Likes Beary") and you won't be able to stop. Crews's humor is Rabelaisian: the bawdy puns are frequently side-splitting, (and of course they parody the self-involved style of named and revered critics), and the wordplay reminds one of Joyce. But for all the laughs, ultimately the message is dead serious: Crews obviously wants to show us that the loss of standards that allows such junk to dominate the intellectual world is helping our culture to do itself in. Postmodern Pooh is a comic masterpiece; it is also an indispensable warning. You can't afford not to read it.
Rating: 
Summary: Theory in search of a subject
Review: You need to have some familiarity with the exciting, contemporary, cutting-edge American literary intellectual scene to get the very best out of this. Being a simple foreigner like Pooh, and a scientist to boot, I don't. That hasn't bothered me much in the past, but now I'm not Saussure. The question is how much theoretical overkill the poor old bear can take. The answer is, while theory is its own justification and the printer ink holds out, the sky's the limit. A galaxy of thinkers is here to enlighten us, courtesy of Prof. Crews: the Derridean, replete with deeply stunning insights and theoretical rigor verging on mortis; the neo-Marxist, living embodiment of Dr. Johnson's wise remark on hope and experience; the barking second-generation feminist; the Lacanian-Deleuzoguattarian (they won't lie down, you know); last but very far from least, the Vicar of Bray type, right-on author of 'The Last Theory Book You'll Ever Need' and several sequels in the same vein. The footnotes - genuine quotations from philosophico-literary theorists - should be studied with the attention they deserve. These are the guardians of the culture. Go on, give yourself a fright. For me the best-realized figure is the Roger Kimball clone, Dudley Cravat III, who by some extraordinary oversight has been invited to contribute to this panel. I suspect the author has most sympathy with, or anyway least antipathy to, this character, but that doesn't save him from a ribbing. "Much has changed, and all of it for the worse, since we ourself, nearing completion of our Harvard dissertation, attended the MLA convention of 1976 and discovered that once-abundant assistant professorships for tradition-minded young scholars had vanished overnight." Amazingly, many of these theories can be applied with equally gratifying success to subjects as diverse as anthropology and art history (not to mention fundamental physics, but that's another story). The names may change, the fads certainly, but forty years on this crew will still be transgressing importantly, if they haven't disappeared up their own discourse: Felicia Marronnez peering myopically at the world through the lenses of a new theory of everything (or nothing, depending on how you look at it); Carla Gulag fixated on some new Jameson and panting for the revolution; N. Mack Hobbs, America's highest-paid (and therefore indisputably best) humanities professor; and Dudley Cravat III harking back to a lost golden age when French theory with an American accent ruled the world. An acquired taste, perhaps, but an interesting and very clever concoction.
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