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Heidi J. De Vries

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January 30, 2002
Postmodern Pooh
Frederick Crews
A Christmas present from my parents. and they did good. The premise of this hilariously clever book is that 11 scholars have been invited to an MLA convention to present papers on that most literary of teddy bears, Winnie-the-Pooh. Crews actually had me going for a bit, until I realized these essays were even more full of crap than the stuff I used to write in college. All of the familiar schools of postmodern criticism are represented here: queer studies, postcolonialism, Marxism, even recovered memory theory. The footnotes to the essays are from actual texts, just in case you don't believe scholars actually talk like this. I saw Harold Bloom in one author, Camille Paglia in another, all of Wired magazine in yet another. Crews gently pokes fun of his subjects as they attempt to deconstruct A.A. Milne's characters, but at the end of it all their words really seem like so much sound and fury. Twenty years from now a new crop of theories could be written all over again. That's the fun of academia.

"Do you know what A means, little Piglet?"
"No, Eeyore, I don't."
"It means Learning, it means Education, it means all the things that you and Pooh haven't got. That's what A means."



   



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09.05.03
The Baburnama
04.24.03
Tomorrow Now
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The Fallen Curtain
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The Gormenghast Novels
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A Free Range Childhood
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The Mount
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The Zine Yearbook, Volume IV
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Dr. Janson's New Vitamin Revolution
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Moral Hazard
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One Degree West
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Halflives
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On Histories and Stories
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The Minority Report
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Zeitgeist
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Media Unlimited
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Against All Odds
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Passage
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Postmodern Pooh
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Toil
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Solitaire of Love
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The Biographer's Tale
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The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory
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