The Pooh Perplex

In this devastatingly funny classic, Frederick Crews skewers the ego-inflated pretensions of the schools and practitioners of literary criticism popular in the 1960s, including Freudians, Aristotelians, and New Critics. Modelled on the “case-books” often used in freshman English classes at the time, “The Pooh Perplex” contains 12 essays written in different critical voices, complete with ridiculous footnotes, tongue-in-cheek “questions and study projects” and hilarious biographical notes on the contributors. With incisive essays such as “A Bourgeois Writer’s Proletarian Fables” and “A la recherche du Pooh perdu”, by distinguished authors such as Duns C. Penwiper and P.R. Honeycomb, “The Pooh Perplex” is sure to delight everyone who has ever had to suffer through a freshman English class – and many of their teachers, too. This edition contains a new preface by the author that compares literary theory then and now and identifies the real-life critics who were spoofed in certain chapters.

Author Biography

Frederick Crews is a professor emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His many books include The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy, The Random House Handbook (currently in its sixth edition), and Postmodern Pooh.