Pooh-Poohing Postmodernism

“Postmodern Pooh is intended to satirise not just a few celebrity critics, but the kind of critical writing that academics and students generally tend to come up with today – evasive, incomprehensible, and making enormous, unjustified claims for the power of texts and language. ” Sandy Starr reviews Frederick Crews’s Postmodern Pooh

—Pooh-Poohing PostmodernismSpiked)

I once saw Crews debate po-mo superstar Richard Rorty at the University of Virginia. Crews used logic and wit to demonstrate how thoroughly discredited Freudian psychoanalysis is outside of English departments. Rorty, being the pragmatist that he is, admitted that Crews was right, but then with a little shrug, defended the continued use of Freudian terms in literary analysis by asking, “But what else have you got?”