Frederick C. Crews
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Frederick C. Crews (born 1933, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), essayist, author, and Professor of English Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Known for decades as one of the nation's most influential literary critics, Crews achieved fame in the popular press because of a controversy over his two essays critiquing Freud, Freudian theory and the recovered memory movement. They were published in the New York Review of Books starting in November 1993. The 1997 book The Memory Wars, on Freud the man and on analytic theory, compiles those essays, the responses, and Crews' replies.
He was, however, previously best known as the author of the puckish 1963 bestseller The Pooh Perplex: A Student Casebook, which satirized the sorts of casebooks then assigned to first-year university students in their introductory English or rhetoric courses. It is likely that Crews will eventually be best remembered for this playfully witty book, with its invented texts giving the purported attitudes of scholars of different stripes (for example, Pooh Bear and company viewed through the lens of the Marxist dialectic). Given the later controversy over Crews’s attitude toward Freudianism, it is interesting to note the section of the book which gives an absurd and extreme Freudian interpretation to the works of A.A. Milne.
[edit] Bibliography
- Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays. 2005 ISBN 1-59376-101-5
- The Memory Wars, Freud's Legacy in Dispute. New York Review of Books, 1997 ISBN 0940322048
- E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism. Textbook Publishers, 2003 ISBN 0-7581-5768-1
- Postmodern Pooh. North Point Press, 2001 ISBN 0-86547-626-8
- The Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend. (As editor) Viking Adult, 1998 ISBN 0-670-87221-0
- The Pooh Perplex: A Student Casebook. E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1963 0-226-12058-9
