that's a bunch of pooh!
JD
-----Original Message-----
From: Kenneth Campbell
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 6/11/2003 4:56 AM
Subject: [PEN-L] Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews
Another thing I think Aldo is right about is language. Write in common
parlance.
Academia has a terrible tendency to write in a "private language" that
keeps it dissociated from the public.
Along that line... Someone suggested that I should read "Postmodern
Pooh" since I like humor that skewers pompous writing styles. (As well
as writing which, like Joyce in Ulysses, adopts a style and perspective
of the seat of consciousness, the person.)
Anyone else read this? It sounds wonderfully and skillfully nasty, at
least per the attached review...
Here's a couple examples of academic theory in action:
Postmodern postcolonial theory and Pooh:
"If the ravages of imperialism are ever to end -- if
the colonising Heffalump one day lies down with the
formerly colonised lamb -- history may record that
the first tremor of productive change was felt here,
today, as we dear friends and scholars
recontextualised a mere space of interrogation as a
veritable site of intervention and, dare I say it,
of contestation as well."
A reviewer wrote:
And to close proceedings, seminar organiser N. Mack
Hobbs (apparently a parody of Stanley Fish) explains
how much cleverer he is than everyone else in a paper
"You Don't Know What Pooh Studies Are About, Do You,
And Even If You Did, Do You Think Anyone Would Be
Impressed?"
I think many "online Marxists" have written variations on that same
paper in Marxism lists! :)
I've noticed a couple folks herein have roots to Berkeley. Do any of you
know this Crews fellow? Any personal thoughts on him?
Ken.
--
What I like doing best is Nothing.
It means just going along, listening to all the
things you can't hear, and not bothering.
-- Winnie the Pooh
"The House At Pooh Corner"
--- cut here ---
Pooh's Pendulum
Eleven scholars deconstruct the billion-dollar bear. (Oh, bother.)
BY TIM APPELO
Seattle Weekly
Published February 5 - 11, 2003
LIKE BILBO'S RING, Winnie the Pooh empowers or destroys all who touch
him. Pooh wrecked the literary career of his creator, A.A. Milne, and so
embittered Milne's neglected son, Christopher Robin, that the boy spent
most of his life a penniless bookseller, declining dime one of Pooh
money and refusing to see his rather nasty parents even when his dad was
dying of cancer.
Walt Disney was thrilled to acquire rights to Pooh; now his faltering
company is addicted to the bear, who generates perhaps one-quarter of
Disney's $25 billion annual revenue. Next month, Disney nemesis Bert
Fields and O.J. nemesis Daniel Petrocelli square off in a lawsuit
against Disney brought by the ex-Broadway showgirl who owns the original
Pooh marketing rights.
A collateral victim of the fracas is the only great artwork in the
post-Pooh canon: the literary-criticism satire of Frederick Crews. In
1963, Berkeley English prof Crews penned the legendary The Pooh Perplex,
learned essays by fictitious critics that lampooned academic fads:
Marxism, New Criticism, Freudianism. Since then, Crews wrote real
scholarship and dazzling popular books that treated Freud and the
recovered- memory movement like Godzilla treated Tokyo. Meanwhile,
Disney made Pooh central to pop culture, and academic culture went
barking mad under the influence of Derrida, de Man, and da rest of the
postmoderns. When David Duchovny left Yale's deconstructionist English
department to star in The X-Files, he was moving in the direction of
normality.
Crews faced two hurdles in writing his new Perplex sequel, Postmodern
Pooh (North Point Press, $12), the transcript of a panel discussion at
an imaginary convention of the Modern Language Association in which
fictitious critics debate 2003 fads like "Zizekian Lacanianism" and
"Counterhegemonic Post-Gramscian Marxism." For one, authorities forbade
Crews to use E.H. Shepard's classic Pooh illustrations--it would be
"disrespectful to A.A. Milne and Ernest H. Shepard as well as damaging
to the brand." This was odd, since Disney's rebranding of Pooh was so
distorting that Shepard called it "a complete travesty." Could Crews do
worse? No matter: The book's parodic prose is colorful enough without
Pooh drawings, and the ursine cover image dramatically illustrates what
a monster our favorite teddy has become.
Crews' second challenge was tougher: to do justice to his satiric
targets, modern critics so crazy it's hard for satire to exaggerate
their hilariousness. Crews solves the problem by inventing imaginary
critics--some based on readily identifiable academic stars--and
anchoring their cuckoo lucubrations with quotes and footnotes from
actual academic publications. Thus the scholar Das Nuffa Dat (from
Calcutta via Eton and Oxford) is Crews' creation, but when Dat cites
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on "the post-colonial attempt at the
impossible cathexis of place-bound history," it's all too real.
Similarly, Carla Gulag, Joe Camel Professor of Child Development at Duke
University, is imaginary. But Duke University (endowed by tobacco money)
is a real postmodern stronghold whose English department was so bitterly
fractious in the '80s that the dean had to put a botany professor in
charge of it. Gulag quotes her Marxist mentor, the real-life literary
theorist Frederic Jameson--he famously defended the Nazi writings of
Paul de Man and wrote that Heidegger's Hitler commitment was "morally
and aesthetically preferable to apolitical liberalism"--and goes on to
note that when Piglet cakes himself in dirt, he's "reasserting his class
identity and [preventing] social castration by the whitening, starching,
homogenizing influence of that sylvan soccer mom, Kanga." The
"gynocritic" Sisela Catheter has a more radical feminist view of Kanga,
not to mention the "Fire Island-style fireworks" of Pooh: "When Eeyore
appears most invitingly available to be sodomized, the abashed Pooh
realizes that the requisite tool is missing." Poor patriarch Pooh! In
"The Courage to Squeal," Dolores Malatesta, a nonexistent Seattle
author, cites actual nut-job authorities to support her theory that
Piglet's a victim of Satanic sexual abuse.
THE ONLY TWO faux critics I can identify as being based on real people
are right-wing Fundament magazine editor Dudley Cravat III and N. Mack
Hobbs, Princeton Trustees' Portfolio Tracking Stock Professor of
English. Cravat growls that if you listen to "the anti-anti-Communist
rainbow coalition, our Pilgrim fathers were mere powwow crashers [and]
the rest of our native land ought to be signed over forthwith to
aborigines and be transformed into one vast combination sweat lodge and
casino." Sounds like New Criterion editor Roger Kimball. When Hobbs
says, "One of my Porsches has a bumper sticker, 'I'd rather be teaching
Hamlet,'" he's got to be megabuck-grubbing professor Stanley Fish;
alarmingly, when Hobbs quotes professors arguing about Henry James'
favorite sexual fantasy--was it fisting himself, or was it sticking his
head in a noisome toilet?--the scholarly quotes are not, alas, bogus.
Milne wrote, "He was never very much good at riddles, being a Bear of
Very Little Brain." But some professors of very little brain happen to
be very good at riddles, and Crews is good at skewering them.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
%T Postmodern Pooh
%A Crews, Frederick
%I North Point
%C New York
%D 2001
%O hardcover
%G ISBN 0-86547-626-8
%P xvi,175pp
%Z biting parody of modern literary criticism
