Background
Crews, Frederick Campbell was born on February 20, 1933 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Son of Maurice Augustus and Robina (Gaudet) Crews.
( Best-selling author and Berkeley professor of thirty ye...)
Best-selling author and Berkeley professor of thirty years 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. Follies of the Wise contains Crews's best writing of the past fifteen years, including such controversial and widely quoted pieces as The Unknown Freud” and The Revenge of the Repressed,” essays whose 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?"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1593761015/?tag=2022091-20
( Purporting to be the proceedings of a forum on Pooh con...)
Purporting to be the proceedings of a forum on Pooh convened at the Modern Language Association's annual convention, this sequel of sorts to the classic send-up of literary criticism, The Pooh Perplex, brilliantly parodies the academic fads and figures that held sway at the millennium. Deconstruction, poststructuralist Marxism, new historicism, radical feminism, cultural studies, recovered-memory theory, and postcolonialism, among other methods, take their shots at the poor stuffed bear and Frederick Crews takes his well-considered, wildly funny shots at them. His aim, as ever, is true.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810123843/?tag=2022091-20
( Surveying Hawthorne's entire career, from his earliest ...)
Surveying Hawthorne's entire career, from his earliest surviving stories through the romances left unfinished at his death, Frederick Crews defines the terms of Hawthorne's self-debate as revealed in his fiction. Hawthorne emerges from this study as a writer of acute psychological awareness. In an Afterword written for this edition, Crews interrogates his own argument with characteristic unsparingness. He candidly reassesses the theoretical commitments behind his book, reflects on the path taken by Hawthorne criticism since 1966, and answers the question that many readers have asked of this ex-Freudian: "How much, today, remains valid in The Sins of the Fathers?" This essay is itself a significant contribution to the current debate over the role of 'theory' in literary studies.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520068173/?tag=2022091-20
(Designed as an easy-to-use, non-jargon-bound reference fo...)
Designed as an easy-to-use, non-jargon-bound reference for writers, the BORZOI features elegant, straightforward language suggestions and advice as it avoids complex grammatical explanations. The handbook is accompanied by a free Practice book that provides exercises based in real discourse units.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0075571838/?tag=2022091-20
(Designed as an easy-to-use, non-jargon-bound reference fo...)
Designed as an easy-to-use, non-jargon-bound reference for writers, the BORZOI features elegant, straightforward language suggestions and advice as it avoids complex grammatical explanations. The handbook is accompanied by a free Practice book that provides exercises based in real discourse units.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0070136386/?tag=2022091-20
( In this devastatingly funny classic, Frederick Crews sk...)
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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226120589/?tag=2022091-20
(Eleven years ago, in Out of My System, the influential li...)
Eleven years ago, in Out of My System, the influential literary critic Frederick Crews served notice that his Freudian sympathies were being eroded. Now, in a closely reasoned and witty new book, he shows where that reappraisal took him and why he has come to regard himself as an opponent of all "self-validating" doctrines. The essays and occasional pieces that make up Skeptical Engagements are linked by a theme that Crews came to understand by trial and error: "the fear of facing the world, including its works of literature, without an intellectual narcotic ready at hand." Having witnessed psychoanalysis from the believer's vantage as well as the skeptic's, Crews offers a uniquely trenchant perspective on Freudian claims. Psychoanalysis, he argues, is a classical pseudoscience--a doctrine insisting on its rigorous evidential basis while refusing in practice to be bound by the ethics of disconfirmation. Such a doctrine becomes overelaborate and even self-contradictory as it continually attempts to appease its doubters and add escape clauses to its failed predictions. Unlike other critics of modern psychoanalysis, Crews traces this tendency to Freud himself, whose stance toward evidence, he shows, ranged from the opportunistic to the flatly dishonest. Skeptical Engagements is also a searing critique of pretension and folly in the literary academy, from deconstructive "freeplay" to post-structuralist Marxism. Such schools have explicitly set themselves against the empirical values which Crews takes to be a requisite in any thriving field of knowledge. And in a final section Crews applies his skepticism and his normative cultural concerns to such diverse figures as Joseph Conrad, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Philip Rahv, and Leslie Fiedler. About the Author: Frederick Crews, Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of nine books, including The Pooh Perplex, E.M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes, The Random House Handbook, and (with Sandra Schor) The Borzoi Book for Writers.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195039505/?tag=2022091-20
(Designed as an easy-to-use, non-jargon-bound reference fo...)
Designed as an easy-to-use, non-jargon-bound reference for writers, the BORZOI features elegant, straightforward language suggestions and advice as it avoids complex grammatical explanations. The handbook is accompanied by a free Practice book that provides exercises based in real discourse units.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/007557179X/?tag=2022091-20
(A distinguished literary critic analyzes his colleagues' ...)
A distinguished literary critic analyzes his colleagues' obscure and ideological treatment of American fiction and makes a powerful case for facing works of literature squarely and empirically.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679404139/?tag=2022091-20
Crews, Frederick Campbell was born on February 20, 1933 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Son of Maurice Augustus and Robina (Gaudet) Crews.
AB, Yale University, 1955; Doctor of Philosophy, Princeton University, 1958.
Faculty, University of California, Berkeley, since 1958;
instructor in English, University of California, Berkeley, 1958-1960;
assistant professor, University of California, Berkeley, 1960-1962;
associate professor, University of California, Berkeley, 1962-1966;
professor, University of California, Berkeley, 1986-1994;
vice-chair for graduate studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1988-1992;
chair department, University of California, Berkeley, 1992-1994;
professor emeritus, since 1994. Member study fellowship selection committee American Council Learned Socs., 1971-1973. Member selection committee summer seminars National Endowment for Humanities, 1976-1977.
Ward-Phillips lecturer U. Notre Dame, 1974-1975, Dorothy T. Burstein lecturer University of California at Los Angeles, 1984. Frederick Ives Carpenter visiting professor University of Chicago,1985. Lansdowne visitor U. Victoria, 1987-1988.
John Dewey lecturer, 1988, Nina Mae Kellogg lecturer Portland (Oregon) State University, 1989. Member Executive Committee board directors Mark Twain Project, since 1984. Faculty research lecturer University of California, Berkeley, 1991-1992.
David L. Kubal Memorial lecturer California State University, Los Angeles, 1994. Member science and professional advisory board False Memory Syndrome Foundation, since 1994.
( Purporting to be the proceedings of a forum on Pooh con...)
( In this devastatingly funny classic, Frederick Crews sk...)
( Surveying Hawthorne's entire career, from his earliest ...)
(A distinguished literary critic analyzes his colleagues' ...)
(Designed as an easy-to-use, non-jargon-bound reference fo...)
(Designed as an easy-to-use, non-jargon-bound reference fo...)
(Designed as an easy-to-use, non-jargon-bound reference fo...)
(Eleven years ago, in Out of My System, the influential li...)
(The elegantly written RANDOM HOUSE HANDBOOK, 6/e, offers ...)
( Best-selling author and Berkeley professor of thirty ye...)
("Humor about premissive parents and disobedient children ...)
(One Hardcover and One Softcover book)
(As stated on cover, "..Discoverd that the true meaning of...)
(A student casebook.Hardback, ex-library, with usual stamp...)
(books)
(1)
Fellow: Council for Science Medicine and Mental Health (member executive council, member committee skeptical inquiry).
Married Betty Claire Peterson, September 9, 1959. Children: Gretchen Elizabeth, Ingrid Anna Crews Márquez.