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."
| 
Heidi J. De Vries
