Number 30
Anyone interested in literature and trends in criticism, or intellectual fads generally, will want to read ~ no, must read ~ two books by Frederick C. Crews, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley. The Pooh Perplex, A Freshman Casebook was published in 1963, but I discovered it only after I'd already finished graduate school. My understanding of the field would have take a quantum leap forward had I known this book while I was still a student. Postmodern Pooh came out in 2001; I learned of its existence when I was searching for a used copy of The Pooh Perplex, which is out of print.
"Almost, one does not know where to begin," to quote P. R. Honeycomb, one of the essayists Crews invented in The Pooh Perplex. (That line has stuck with me for more than two decades. It's useful for so many occasions.) The Perplex is a parody of a kind of textbook that used to be popular. An academic who needed to publish something in his or her climb to tenure would collect essays and organize them as examples to teach principles of composition (the thesis sentence, the paragraph, rhetoric, logic, and so on). When I was a freshman, we used Prose Models by my professor, Gerald Levin. It was a good one, and surprisingly is still in print. I say surprisingly because there's a big turnover in textbooks in the interest of profits, and, I assume, to give new scholars a chance at publication, and for other reasons, as we may deduce from the Crews books.
Unlike Prose Models, sometimes the casebook essays would be about one topic, so Crews wrote a dozen essays about Winnie-the-Pooh, including a preface, biographies of the "authors", who were modeled after real literary scholars, questions and study projects with each essay, and footnotes. He captured brilliantly an assortment of critical stances and styles that I'd only skimmed the surface of as a student ~ plus the jealousy and contempt among the various camps. Perhaps the easiest way to explain the book would be to adopt the survey method of the casebooks, and give you a taste of this and that, though it's all so good that I'd like just to read the whole thing to you.
The preface to The Pooh Perplex begins,
Winnie-the-Pooh is, as practically everyone knows, one of the greatest books ever written, but it is also one of the most controversial. Nobody can quite agree as to what it really means! . . . You will find it impossible to decide which of the critics represented has "the word" about Pooh. . . . The answer is not easy to seek out, but . . . you will find much intellectual excitement in your four-year period as an undergraduate; and if at the end of that time you have not accepted some halfway answer or given up the quest, you can pass on to graduate school, becoming more and more broad-minded as time goes by.
The table of contents alone is enough to make me smile.
What has happened in the English lit game in the ensuing four decades? Crews tells us in Postmodern Pooh, a collection of Pooh papers from a fictional panel in the 2000 Modern Language Association convention, which encapsulates "Teaching the Conflicts" ~ "the very disputes that cause professors of literature to defame one another as sexists, fascists, and idiots can become the organized heart of the major." The same old ship of fools in new (or perhaps the emperor's) clothing. If I'd had this book when I returned to school for a Ph.D. after a long hiatus, I would have been spared much confusion. I had no clue that deconstruction had appeared, much less what it was, and I had one professor who, when I asked him a question, said with an evil smile, "You'd like me to tell you, wouldn't you?" Well, yeah. I never did finish the Ph.D., not entirely because of him.
This time around, Crews could not get permission to use illustrations from the original Pooh books, as he had in The Pooh Perplex, and he dispenses with the questions for freshman discussion. But this loss is more than offset by his use of real footnotes and quotes from real writers like Jacques Derrida, Annie Sprinkle, and Mary Daly, with his fictive essays. Now for the delicious contents:
In the two eras of English lit studies as outlined by these books, the Marxist-political interpretations have proliferated, along with feminist theory (Crews ignores ethnic or race studies except for Das Nuffa Dat). Christian (Catholic) interpretation (Culpepper) has been replaced by Marxist faith (Gulag). Deconstruction into no-meaning has taken the place of the search for symbolic meaning. Your basic Freudianism has given way to, well, more of the same, but also to picking out criminal undercurrents in the text. Psychology is outclassed by technology. Disgruntled traditionalists still abound, along with shallow panderers to conventional unwisdom.
If these books don't sound like your cup of tea, but you know someone who's studying or teaching English in college, do buy them for the poor fool. It will save them worlds of trouble. You can still find a few reasonably priced used copies of The Pooh Perplex, and Postmodern Pooh is still available in both hard and soft cover.
Copyright Rhonda Keith 2003. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but it is permissible to forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.
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