Postmodern Pooh

Description: 'Postmodern Pooh is the funniest and most incisive [satire on literary criticism] to date. Using a blend of acute imitation and with frequent reference to respected critical texts, Crews demonstrates that despite the purported differences between recent schools of critical thought, all of them have a tendency to use digression, sexual and scatalogical obsession, self-conscious erudition and irrelevant quotation to distract the reader from the emptiness of their argument...The only comparable publication, for both satirical acuity and hilarity, is the infamous hoax paper that the physicist Alan Sokal published.' --The TLS reviewing the US edition.

Review: 'A brilliant and savagely witty skewering of the combatants on all sides of the academic culture wars' The Washington Post 'Fred Crews is a Person of Very Great Brain. What he pooh-Poohs, deserves it. Reading this book actually makes me grateful that I toil in the jargon-choked fields of psychology instead of the impenetrably murky caverns of literary criticism. But literary criticism is luckier than psychology: It has Fred Crews to light the way.' Carol Tavris



Author Biography: Frederick Crews is Professor Emeritus of English at University of California, Berkeley. Nearly 40 years ago he wrote The Pooh Perplex, a trailer for this book. He is also the author of The Memory Wars, a withering attack on 'recovered memory syndrome' and numerous other works. He is one of the most distinguished critics in the United States.