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A review of Postmodern Pooh

by Frederick Crews

Marvelous spoof of lit crit by means of Pooh and a fictitious MLA conference

Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple

Postmodern Pooh Frederick Crews takes the children’s classics Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne and invites a range of professional literary critics to sink their claws into them. In fact, Crews has invented an MLA (Modern Language Association) conference where 11 radical speakers represent various contemporary directions in literary criticism. The text of their speeches are preceded by biographies: "Sea & Ski Professor English at UC Irvine"; postcolonialist Das Nuffa Dat; the Exxon Valdez Chair in Humanities, founder of the journal Quelconque [something or other]; a specialist in "the application of scientific rigor to the study of children’s literature." He even finds a way to make fun of the victims’ movement of recovering repressed memories, by creating a mother whose daughter revealingly winces in pain at each mention of the character Piglet.

Postmodern Pooh is not for everyone. You have to be at least vaguely familiar with the terms postmodernism and Derridean discourse, to have heard of the schools of thought that have dominated academic literary criticism in recent decades. But even a superficial acquaintance is enough to find this parody of the seriousness with which critics have taken themselves and their methods highly amusing. These are movements that are a joy to rip apart, as the academics write in turgid, incomprehensible prose with a great self-importance.

The academic writers in this field seem to compete for the most far-fetched writing style. Let’s take on Marxism:

"The characters’ classless equality and their lack of anything in particular that needs doing indicate that they dwell at either the beginning or the end of History – that is, either before or after the several cycles of exploitation that began with the earliest organized exchange of goods and services."

Or militant feminism:

"Note that it’s only the male characters – and all of the male characters – who are made uneasy about their identity. They are, shall we say, less than cocksure as to who they are. There seems to be a certain estrangement between the Pooh males’ executive ego upstairs and the reluctant John Henry who’s supposed to be doing the heavy lifting below."

On theorizing along the lines of whether Shakespeare was really the author of his works:

"Among Milne’s contemporaries, very few meet the triple criteria for authorship of Pooh: metaphysical pessimism, extraordinary literary gifts, and a knack for writing sympathetically about animal characters. There is, of course, Franz Kafka, a worthy candidate in all three respects."

If you’ve dabbled at all in the past 30 years of academic writing about books, you’ll be rolling on the floor in laughter – or at least chuckling – all the way through.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Postmodern Pooh

Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2003










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