"Free Winnie": Rev-Ursine Academic Trends (and Relations)

On a more positive note, though, Postmodern Pooh, which I'm rereading currently, is magnificent. It's the 2001 follow-up to Frederick Crews's The Pooh Perplex, a gentle book of spoof criticism published in 1964 to noises of considerable enjoyment and appreciation. The "authors" of that "anthology" spent their time teasing out the supposed Freudian or Marxist themes, literary or religious allusions, and even evaluations of literary worth, from Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, in a thoroughly gentlemanly manner. The only "essay" inflected by critical theory lampooned it by having its author nowhere engage with the actual texts of the books he was supposedly examining.

I utterly love The Pooh Perplex, which got me through some times of disillusionment during my English degree -- but compared with it, Postmodern Pooh is vitriol-soaked dynamite. This time the very much older Crews is on the offensive, and he means it. The various vacuities of deconstructionism, New Historicism and Feminism and Marxism in their modern inflections are unflinchingly laid bare (or possibly "bear"). I (and I suspect Crews) actually have a lot of time for many of the premises and beliefs of these various schools, but like him I simply can't abide the dogma, the impenetrable jargon and the smug self-referentialism of the modern academia they've spawned.

Unlike Crews, however, I would have had neither the skill nor the patience to immerse myself thoroughly in these doctrines in order to produce such acerbic parodies, in which (for instance) the Marxist critic Frederic Jameson is admiringly compared by one of his followers with Mao Zedong, or an Oxford-educated postcolonialist dismisses the vast mass of his fellow Indians as difficult to take seriously thanks to their insufficient background in postcolonial critical theory. While the essays are spoofs, the extensive supporting material adduced by their "authors" is all real: the book apparently took Crews two years to research, and his eye for an inadvertently self-ridiculing quote is utterly merciless.

The disciple of Derrida, who opens the book by emphasising that "After we have registered the fatal instability of our concepts, they still remain our concepts, all the more precious for our awareness that they, and therefore we, fail to intersect with 'reality' at any point", and who ends her paper by degenerating into sub-Joycean gibberish culminating in a heartfelt "HIPY PAPY BTUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY!", is particularly hilarious.

To anyone who's been exposed to modern critical theory, I can't recommend this book highly enough. To anyone who hasn't, admittedly it may be a bit impenetrable.