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"Postmodern Pooh" is a critical update to the satire, "Pooh Perplex," which Frederick Crews created in 1964. Here, Crews offers 11 essays, purported to have come from a panel of scholars on Pooh, which fictitiously convened at the Modern Language Association Convention in December 2000. The essays from these fictional participants all make jabs at academia, with slants toward deconstruction, poststructuralist marxism, feminism, new historicism, biopoetics, cultural studies, and more.


Here are the titles of the essays:

• "Why? Wherefore? Inasmuch as Which?" by Felicia Marronnez.
• "A Bellyful of Pooh," by Victor S. Fassell.
• "The Fissured Subtext: Historical Problematics, the Absolute Cause, Transcoded Contradictions, and Late-Capitalist Metanarrative (in Pooh)," by Carla Gulag.
• "Just Lack a Woman," by Sisera Catheter.
• "The Importance of Being Portly," by Orpheus Bruno.
• "Resident Aliens," by Das Nuffa Dat.
• "Gene/Meme Covariation in Ashdown Forest: Pooh and the Consilience of Knowledge," by Renee Francis.
• [li["The Courage to Squeal," by Dolores Malatesta.
• "Virtual Bear," by Biggloria3.
• "Twilight of the Dog," by Dudley Cravat III.
• "You Don't Know What Pooh Studies Are About, Do You, and Even If You Did, Do You Think Anybody Would Be Impressed?" by N. Mack Hobbes.

 

Discussing the Bear

And, what makes Winnie the Pooh a proper topic for such a discussion of fun and utter nonsense? Why, the bear is perfect if for no other reason than for the fact that "Pooh fills the bill" as a "classic": a work that facilitates "professional discourse production" and nobody "has mapped all of its ambiguities, contradictions, and trapdoors for the unwary."

Crews concludes his preface by explaining that this book "forms a bookend, as it were, concluding my long if uneventful career of devotion to humanistic values and to Pooh."