Postmodern Pooh (review)

Frederick Crews. Postmodern Pooh. New York: North Point P, 2001.

In Postmodern Pooh, Frederick Crews has gathered together a brilliant collection of eleven theoretically informed essays that capture contemporary Pooh Studies in all its rich diversity and complexity. This critical anthology will help to establish Pooh Studies as a significant aspect of literary studies much in the same way that Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler's Cultural Studies (1992) helped to popularize the practices of Cultural Studies in the United States. While these essays will be of great value to literary critics, they could also be of interest to many readers beyond the academy (we hope!).

Crews's essays are presented as if they were the polished versions of the papers presented by a group of star academics at a Pooh panel from last year's MLA conference in Washington, D.C. Postmodern Pooh is an extremely clever and wicked updating of his earlier The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook (1963), in which Crews poked fun at the current literary trends of the day. How things change, but remain the same! As Crews explains in the preface, the once popular casebook that was widely used in freshman English courses has gone the way of the dinosaur, but anthologies of theoretical essays that teach the conflicts are now all the rage. What Crews has done in updating The Pooh Perplex is to add critical approaches based on deconstruction, feminism, new historicism, cultural studies, and postcolonialism that weren't included in the original collection. Crews taught in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley from 1958 to 1994 and is the author of a number of scholarly works, so it is not surprising that he has a good ear for various critical discourses. I'm not sure if this is the sort of playfulness of language that Helene Cixous had in mind in "The Laugh of the Medusa," but I found this to be one of the funniest critiques of the academy since David Lodge's Small World (1984). While the essays in Postmodern Pooh are not as comprehensive as Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology (1998) or the ever-popular and constantly revised A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (1985) by Raman Selden, which has become a sort of Cliff's Notes to critical theory, it is much more fun to read.

Crews mentions that over the years he had been encouraged by readers of The Pooh Perplex to update the collection. Obviously, a great deal of new critical theory generated in the intervening thirty-eight years. When I taught a graduate course called "Critical Theories of Children's Literature" I had the bright idea of using The Pooh Perplex as one of the assignments, then having students create parodies of recent critical theories. In addition to Crews's text, the seminar was going to read several other collections of critical essays dealing with children's texts, such as Peter Hunt's Children's Literature: The Development of Criticism (1990) and Literature for Children's Contemporary Criticism (1992), as well as Shelia Egoff's Only Connect: Readings on Children's Literature, 3rd edition (1996). Since successful parody pays careful attention to the original text, I thought it would be a useful exercise to have the students create their own parodies of critical approaches to Pooh using a theory that Crews hadn't already used in The Pooh Perplex. It was only after I submitted the book order that I realized The Pooh Perplex was out of print. But I was able to put a few copies of it on reserve and the students were enthusiastic in trying to outdo Crews. One of the class favorites was a queer reading of Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad Are Friends (1970) entitled "Frog and Toad Are More Than Just Friends." The essay turned out to be clever and entertaining, but also a surprisingly insightful interpretation of the text—just...