So one thing to stress is that it’s not like critique is about being mean while postcritique is about being nice. It just seems that way b/c these are two different theories of how to understand social reality, with differing sub-theses about how to analyze attachments.

Also, the charge isn’t that critique doesn’t read works carefully or generously. The charge is rather one of emphasis: that critique reads carefully in order to find what the text does not say (because it can’t say it).

Notice though that a basic question remains. For critique a work can’t admit how what it is about is made possible by conditions it's not about, and for postcritique of course it can, because there aren’t such conditions. But what is it for a literary work to be about something?

Here’s one of the areas where I wish there was a closer connection between literary and the philosophy of art, because the best answer I’ve found to this question is in Lamarque and Olsen’s 1994 Truth, Fiction, and Literature.

At one point they imagine a reader of Euridipes’s Hippolytus who understands all the sentences of the play but doesn’t understand how they come together to address large questions concerning the freedom of the will. What has such a reader missed?

Well, they think, he will have missed that the play was *about* something, that its sentences fit together and create a unity. The unifying structure is a theme, and grasping their incorporation under that theme is essential to appreciating it as a work of art.

So, I like this account, and it clears a lot of ground. Moreover I think it distills and clarifies a lot of the intuitions literary critics use when they talk about aboutness.

But I disagree with it! It’s at once too strong and too weak.

Too strong: note how the argument hinges on defining one way of experiencing the work as the *only* way of experiencing it as a work of art. But the key premise in that argument is ultimately on a preference for one kind of aesthetic experience over another.

And it’s tough to see an argument for that premise. Why not say I prefer to recognize David Copperfield as sexist Victorian ideology? If the only claim that it isn’t *about* these things is a preference for experiencing it a different way, well, hmm. Why do you prefer that?

Too weak: because it understates the extent to which texts can invite consideration under certain things on the basis of what they literally say. Like, George Eliot often basically says, “this novel is about sympathy.” The Matrix just asks, "What if what you see isn't real?"

So at least in my particular brand of postcritique, what’s being rejected just as much as critique is the formalist preference for certain kinds of aesthetic experiences and the monopoly thematic comprehension has on aesthetic appreciation.

Instead, the idea is to understand and appreciate how readers sometimes value works on the basis of their literal content — the overt things they actually say — and it that sense it emphasizes what the work says it’s about. /end