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PARTISAN REVIEW
Reading Crews's bitter but all-too-accurate words, one is reminded of
the Israeli army recruit who was asked if he could swim. "No, sir," he
replied, "but I know the theory of it." In much the same way, far too
many undergraduates know the "theory" (or theories) of literature
without the bother of reading primary works.
Interestingly enough, the sad turn of events Crews clearly deplores
was foreshadowed in
The Pooh Perplex.
There, each casebook essay
was dutifully followed by outrageously inappropriate "Questions and
Study Projects." The one following Benjamin Thumb's hyper-scholarly
"The Style of Pooh: Sources, Analogues, and Influences" is an arrow
pointing toward the heart of our current problems:
1.
Professor Thumb makes allusion
to
the general critical agree–
ment now happily prevailing on the subject of
King Lear,
a play by
Shakespeare. Get your teacher
to
recommend two or three articles
on
Lear
from one of the many Shakespeare casebooks; read the
articles, and make a report to your class on the agreed-upon mean–
ing of the play.
If
you find that you have some extra time, you
might read
King Lear
itself.
Talk about "disconnect"! What
The Pooh Perp lex
makes clear is not
only how absurd literary critics look when they try to pluck the heart
out of Pooh's mystery but also how irrelevant these exercises in ingenu–
ity are to undergraduate education. Still, the casebooks that were
Crews's original models had the singular virtue of exposing students to
the full, often annotated texts of serious literary work, and this is surely
better than the current crop of composition anthologies devoted to mul–
ticulturalism and identity politics.
In Crews's sequel, the setting is a panel put together for an annual
meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA), an event that has
provided pundits with enough ammunition to write endless op-ed
columns about the sorry state of literary study. Undergraduate students
are no longer the focus; rather, the interest is square ly on careerism and
who can grab the hottest new theoretical wire . Each of the panelists
who holds forth about Pooh asks, in effect, the following question:
"Mirror, mirror, on the wall,/Who's the most radical theorist of us all?"
And, not surprisingly, each insists that it is
moi.
As Carla Gulag (nice
name, that!) insists in a paper that begins with an in-your-face "Power
to
the people!" the only question about "conflict" that need be settled
is who are the pretenders and who the Real Goods. This, to her mind,
is a no-brainer: "while every school of criticism these days is concerned
