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Literary critic Leslie Fiedler, who helped launch the concept of the "postmodern," or PoMo, to the general public in the early 1950s, said that westerns and science fiction pulps ought to be studied in universities alongside Milton and Twain.
While today's scholars ponder how to define the post-postmodern in the age of the United States of McDonald's and Microsoft, Crews has raised the bar yet again with POSTMODERN POOH, a "long awaited" follow up to 1963's POOH PERPLEX, a collection of hilarious pseudointellectual papers from mock professors and experts vigorously tearing universal truths and psychological secrets from the pages of A. A. Milne.
For the Freudian, Marxist, NeoAristotelian, Biopoeticist, Deconstructionist, and Postcultualist in all of us, POSTMODERN POOH, like its predecessor, satirizes university and literary conference doctoratespeak while posing as highbrow criticism. Crews equally champions and disparages Fiedler's cause, adding the study of children's literature and the creation of the essay and "call for papers" conference in the harsh light of post-postmodern Pooh analysis paralysis, or Po-PoMo-PoohAP, while paradoxically mocking postmodern criticism in the face of one of PoMo's rivals, the corporatization and American Generica embraced by today's youth (every new kid's cartoon feature film has a McDonald's or Burger King tie-in) at the greedy hands of Disney, owners of the recreated Pooh characters. In outpostmoderning the postmodern, or creating the post-postmodern, Crews offers something that implodes intellectually or acts like a vacuum cleaner suddenly sucking its own hose, unable to stop.
It is almost possible to take Crews seriously until he reveals in his introduction to POSTMODERN POOH that his Princeton professor friend, N. Mack Hobbs, who held the Pooh panel at the December 2000 Modern Language Association conference from which these papers were "gathered," published the book before Crews had a chance, or bothered, to take the time to read these 11 penetrating essays.
Felicia Marronnez, Sea & Ski Professor of English at UC Irvine, opens the collection pondering the symbolism of the landmarks in the 100 Acre Wood, from the broken sign outside Piglet's house "Trespassers W" and Pooh's house sign, "Mr. Sanders," to Piglet's own attempts to communicate in writing during the various catastrophes that strike in THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER. The next offering comes from Victor S. Fassell, Exxon Valdez Chair in the Humanities at Rice University. Fassell, also the author of "The Sorcerer's Appendix," stresses that Pooh characters are often "fetishizing about the breast and phallus, respectively" while living in a "de facto nudist colony." As an avid reader and young father, I personally found Fassell to be the perfect fodder for the eyes to glaze over and the mind to wander back to that (not so) innocent world of the 100 Acre Wood. Carla Gulag, Duke University's Joe Camel Professor of Child Development, sees the slightly less-than-naked but all-too-telling-not-to-be-really-really-true-too-smart-well-read-and-heavily-pierced Marxist in POOH CORNER: "By caking himself in dirt, Piglet is reasserting his class identity and thus preserving himself from social castration by the whitening, starching, homogenizing influence of that sylvan soccer mom, Kanga." Feminist Sistera Catheter says that when Eeyore's tail falls off "he is so unsure of his maleness that he now hopes to transform himself into an unborn baby woman" by hiding his head between his legs. Orpheus Bruno, Harvard's Hasty Puddings Theatricals Professor, determines the real author behind THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER by consulting a Ouija board, while Emory University's Classic Coke Professor Das Nuffa Dat labels Milne a racist complacent pacifist. The standout paper, "Virtual Bear" by SUNY Stony Brook's Biggloria3, delivered at the conference under a continuous strobe light and white noise, manipulates Pooh's future, his only future, as cyber homosexual fiction.
Crews "friend" Hobbs sums up this "book" with a brighter note: "POOH works flawlessly as a comedy of errors for five-year-olds, but it's also a hall of mirrors whose intricacy bears comparison to the best of Conrad, Kafka, Borges, and Pynchon." Oprah might dare to add Franzen but that may be Pooh much, indeed.
nbsp; --- Reviewed by Brandon M. Stickney
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