Postmodern Pooh Quotes

“The immediate issue here is whether the Pooh animals realise they constitute a de facto nudist colony.”
― Frederick C. Crews, Postmodern Pooh

“But with whom, in the Pooh world, could a sexually and politically aroused Kanga speak?”
― Frederick C. Crews, Postmodern Pooh

“Attend to Pooh without sentimentality and ask yourself what positive social traits he can plausibly be taken to represent. He is a freeloader whose affability extends no further than his next honey fix. Deconstructed, he is just a mouth and a digestive tract in charge of some rudimentary powers of rationalization. And when he is confronted with a different genus (the apian) pursuing its own programmed livelihood, he shows himself utterly incapable of acknowledging the Other. “The only reason for making honey,” he deduces with infantile self-in-fat-uation, “is so as I can eat it.” Community values? One for all and all for one? Furthermore, Pooh’s selfishness is no greater than that of the whole kapok menagerie surrounding him. It is only his inability to disguise or dignify raw need that renders him the touchstone of value-in-reverse. While the hidebound “Milne” is musing complacently about rectitude and cooperation, his principal creation embodies a brute-all Brechtian forthrightness about the priority of aliment over intellect—and therefore of his majesty the ego over moral claims. Every gregarious sentiment in these books stands self-refuted in the very act of articulation.”
― Frederick C. Crews, Postmodern Pooh

“A teaching-the Conflicts English department says in effect to expectant 19-year-olds - and Hobbs kindly wrote out this baffling lingo at my request - "Here is Husserlian phenomenology, here are the Jungian archetypes, here is Jakobsonian structuralism, here is Zizekian Lakanianism, here is Counterhegemonic Post-Gramscian Marxism, and here is the Deleuzoguattarian Anti-Oedipus; now you_ decide which hermeneutic should prevail."
Thus a newly minted B.A. cab step confidently into the greater world, not knowing Milton or Gray perhaps, but knowing exactly how he would want to account for the magic of their art, should the occasion ever arise,”
― Frederick C. Crews, Postmodern Pooh