Bøger af Frederick Crews

"Frederick Crews's "The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes has become a classic in the field of Hawthorne studies and can be considered one of the most intelligent psychoanalytic readings of a major American writer."--Joel Porte, Cornell University"The best book we have on Hawthorne, bar none."--Giles Gunn, University of California, Santa Barbara

In this devastatingly funny classic, Frederick Crews skewers the ego-inflated pretensions of the schools and practitioners of literary criticism popular in the 1960s, including Freudians, Aristotelians, and New Critics. Modeled on the "casebooks" often used in freshman English classes at the time, The Pooh Perplex contains twelve essays written in different critical voices, complete with ridiculous footnotes, tongue-in-cheek "questions and study projects," and hilarious biographical notes on the contributors. This edition contains a new preface by the author that compares literary theory then and now and identifies some of the real-life critics who were spoofed in certain chapters.

Frederick Crews has always considered himself a skeptic. Forty years ago he thought he had found a tradition of thought -- Freudian psychoanalytic theory -- that had skepticism built into it. He gradually realized, however, that true skepticism is an attitude of continual questioning. The more closely Crews examined the logical structure and institutional history of psychoanalysis, the more clearly he realized that Freud's system of thought lacked empirical rigor. Indeed, he came to see Freudian theory as the very model of a modern pseudoscience. Crews has had the mantle of contrarian thrust upon him. "Follies of the Wise contains his best writing of the past fifteen years, including such controversial and widely quoted pieces as "The Unknown Freud" and "The Revenge of the Repressed." These essays effects still reverberate today. In addition, his topics range from "Intelligent Design" creationism to theosophy, from psychological testing to UFO zaniness, from American Buddhism to the current state of literary criticism. A single theme animates his bracing and witty discussions: the temptation to reach for deep wisdom without attending to the little voice that asks, "Could I, by any chance, be deceiving myself here?"