The Australian writer Jessica Zhan Mei Yu and I spent several months exchanging emails about her 2023 novel, But the Girl, and the affinities between postcritique and contemporary fiction. We first met in 2019 when I was giving a talk at the University of Melbourne, where Jess was a Ph.D. student in creative writing. She is now a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Melbourne and a writer of fiction, poetry, academic criticism and essays.

But the Girl’s unnamed narrator, an Australian Ph.D. student from a Malaysian Chinese family, is supposed to be writing a dissertation on race and Sylvia Plath. When she is offered a Commonwealth scholarship at an artist’s residency near Edinburgh, however, she commits to writing a postcolonial novel. As it moves between Australia and Scotland, But the Girl nails down the strangeness of artistic and academic milieus as perceived by an outsider: the self-important pontifications, the casual racism, the obligatory trading of grateful smiles for institutional funding. At one point, the narrator draws up a table listing the supposed differences between Plath scholars and Plath groupies; why, she wonders, are the former so desperate to distinguish themselves from the latter? As this question lies at the heart of my own thinking, I knew we would have a lot to talk about.

—Rita Felski

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Rita Felski: When you suggested a conversation on the connections between postcritique and contemporary fiction, I was immediately intrigued, as I had recently heard from two other Australian writers about their interest in postcritical thought and its influence on their work. Gail Jones had sent me a copy of her wonderful novel One Another, about an Australian student writing a dissertation on Joseph Conrad at Cambridge who becomes increasingly disenchanted with conventional academic writing. And not long before, Simon Tedeschi, who’s a pianist as well as a writer, had mailed me a copy of his innovative Fugitive, which blends poetry, philosophy, history and autobiography and is based on the music of Prokofiev. So I was very eager to read But the Girl and found it quite enthralling, especially because it throws light on many of the issues that interest me: the relations between academic and nonacademic reading, thought and emotion, and literature and life.

Jessica Yu: I think it’s really interesting that you have had so many writers of fiction engage with your work. It shows that fiction and postcritique have a kind of kinship. And, in my case, there are very direct ways in which your writing on reading and how we read affected the way I thought about and wrote my novel.

One of the things that you wrote about in Uses of Literature, which has stuck with me for a long time, is that recognition of the self in texts as a mode of reading has become particularly important to women and minorities in recent times. And yet “even as recognition pervades practices of reading and interpretation, theoretical engagement with recognition is hedged round with prohibitions and taboos, often spurned as unseemly, even shameful, seen as the equivalent of a suicidal plunge into unprofessional naïveté.” You go on to ask: “Isn’t it the ultimate form of narcissism to think that a book is really about me? Isn’t there something excruciatingly self-serving about reading a literary work as an allegory of one’s own dilemmas and personal difficulties? And don’t we risk trivializing and limiting the realm of art once we start turning texts into mirrors of ourselves?”

These questions about recognition—reading and seeing the self as a woman of color not so much in texts as into them—are the questions that both haunt and animate my novel. The central character, Girl, is a graduate student writing her dissertation on Sylvia Plath, so she’s getting initiated into the ways of academia. She starts to wonder if she is still allowed to speak of love; of loving books; of imagining herself into them (even when she doesn’t actually exist in canonical texts); of her at times jejune, emotional, even selfish relationship to texts. Of course, this is in itself a somewhat naïve way of breaking up academic practice into binaries of objective/subjective, mind/body, etc. But then the question about what it means to be a naïf, an innocent, is also a big part of the novel. Girl is pretty young and inexperienced as both a person and a researcher. She hasn’t yet discovered postcritique! If she did, she would know that critique might be important—and it is to her; she’s deeply critical of the way Plath writes people of color, for example—but so is love. So, that’s one very direct way that the ideas of my novel and the central character of my novel work through some of the problems with academic writing and thinking that you have pointed out in your work on postcritique.

RF: The book seems, in many ways, to be about the value of weakness, of not-doing, framed within a transnational context. The narrator’s parents and grandmother see white people as a self-satisfied and alien race: “expressing the self, which seemed to be the great project of the Western world … was simply embarrassing given the sacred otherness of another person’s interiority.” The narrator is forced to move between radically different cultural worlds that remain ignorant of each other, even as she is repeatedly reminded of her otherness by the everyday racism of white Australians.

Even so, there is, to my mind, something distinctively Australian about this voice in its self-deprecating humor, its lack of moral earnestness, its refusal to take itself too seriously. It’s quite unlike anything I’ve encountered. There is a remarkable glissando effect as this voice slides imperceptibly from irony to deadpan humor to seeming naivete to self-deprecation to heartfelt emotion, sometimes seeming to contain all of them at once. I’m thinking here of sentences such as this one: “my bad, secret thing is I think I’d rather be the muse for some great male artist than go to the trouble of being an artist myself.” There’s something fascinating about the narrator’s willingness to flout the prescriptions of what we might call the feminist superego: the norms and expectations, among the knowledge class, about “proper” female identity as a matter of self-actualization and empowerment. She expresses her skepticism about a “self-affirming feminism lite” as well as the stirring appeals to “real women” in the body positivity movement, preferring, she says, to be a fake woman. And in the same paragraph, she writes: “I knew that, paradoxically, frailty and weakness in the body of a woman was a kind of armor, sword and shield against the scorn of the world. So, I had made a special discipline out of disappearing my own desires.”

“Embarrassing” is one of the most frequently used words in the novel—the narrator refuses to feel embarrassed about her own embarrassment—and I was struck by the fact that it’s also applied to her home country. “Feeling embarrassed about Australia’s provincial personality … had always been automatic to me and everyone I knew.” Perhaps this is another example of the possible advantages of weakness?

JY: We often discuss the minorness of being a minority, the difficulty of being “other,” and rightly so. But I wanted to write a book about how there are certain aspects of marginalization that are extremely congruent with, that can be an advantage to, creativity and thinking and writing. And no, I don’t mean the ever-exhausted and exhausting arguments that it is somehow difficult to write and publish as a white man and much easier to write and publish when you are not a white man. I mean that when you are made an object, you actually learn a lot about the subject and subjectivity; when you are made “other,” you actually end up knowing a lot about the kind of person that gets to be “self” because when you are powerless you know a lot more about power than the powerful. For example, when you are a woman, you typically are trained from a very young age to understand the nuances of masculinity; when you’re “classed,” you end up studying the intricacies of what it means to dress, speak and adopt the manners and mannerisms of the bourgeoisie.

So, you tend to learn a lot more about the center than the center could ever know about you—than the center might even know about itself. The experience of “otherness” can actually make you very alive to other lives. You’ve always had to be more creative and thoughtful simply to survive, but then you might find that these things make you much more generative in the way you see, think, write and articulate your view of the world. Which is what I hope the book does—articulate a view of the world—that manages to remain irreverent about irreversible power dynamics.

Girl begins the novel with an acute sense of her powerlessness in the world and a certain set of coping skills to navigate this world and, I suppose, to quietly undermine the powerful. As you say, one of those skills is a kind of reliance upon humor, a very Australian sense of humor (in spite of the character’s uneasy relationship with Australianness) to feel as if she can briefly float above her difficulties, difficulties in herself, in others, in the world. But ultimately she ends the novel with a new understanding of weakness as a place of force, activity, creativity, energy and dynamism.

RF: How would you describe your approach to the novel as a form? I was especially struck by the narrator’s observation: “The novel was a powerless form … But as I thought more about it, I decided there was nothing deforming about this powerless form—it was appropriate to my own powerlessness. I thought I might be able to revel in it.”

JY: In terms of form, I feel that there is a strong relationship between postcritique and the autofictive mode. My novel could be called autofiction because it uses the first person, the “I,” in an unstable and playful way that feels confessional or like an outpouring of the author’s actual consciousness (even if it very often isn’t that at all). It’s also a novel of consciousness with an almost claustrophobic or solipsistic focus on how Girl sees the world and others.

When I write essays, I adopt the ficto-critical mode very often, using the “I” voice to feel my way through larger ideas, theory and texts. I think about when you discuss the arrogant, apparently rigorous and sophisticated mode of critique and you say: “What would a less strong theory look like, one that leaves room for the aleatory and the unexpected, the chancy and the contingent? That does not trace textual meaning back to an opaque and all-determining power, while presuming the critic’s immunity from the weight of this ubiquitous domination?”

For me, it’s the autofictive and ficto-critical mode that might begin to do this. I think of Sianne Ngai writing about the political powerlessness of the novel as a form or what Anne Anlin Cheng calls the novel’s self-indulgence. The quote you pulled out about the powerless form of the novel is from my protagonist who, like a lot of people, feels foolish, self-indulgent and embarrassed for writing fiction. But then she realizes that those feelings are kind of baked into the form and they can be potent in their own way, which is the same conclusion that I’ve come to in my own practice.

RF: We’ve seen quite a few novels in recent decades that draw on or satirize literary theory, but, as you say, adding a first-person perspective to the mix makes a difference. I agree that postcritique has affinities with the current wave of autotheory. There seems to be a deep investment among writers such as Dionne Brand, Maggie Nelson and Kate Zambreno in the triangular relation of literature, theory and experience. This is also a question that I deal with in a more analytical way in the book I have just finished, called Reading with the New Frankfurt School. When can we trust first-person experience? And when might it prove unreliable? Can we acknowledge the importance of the self’s relation to the self without simply rubber-stamping whatever anyone happens to think or feel? Such questions are, I think, central to both postcritique and recent fiction; both take it as axiomatic that we can’t simply transcend our experience, but they also draw on theoretical ideas to question aspects of that experience.

JY: That’s definitely an aspect of postcritique that appeals to me as someone who straddles the creative/critical nexus: that it doesn’t presuppose a unidirectional relationship between critical theory and creative work. Instead, in the postcritical lens, it’s very possible that they act upon each other, which is what happens inside of me whenever I’m writing. These things are all mixed up, and I’m making sense of my thoughts and feelings through theory and academic papers but also through poems and essays and fiction and a story that my mum told me growing up and a thing I saw in the park the other day. Though I get the sense that when you say you want to avoid “rubber-stamping whatever anyone happens to think or feel,” you don’t necessarily have the same relationship to the personal as a form of knowledge or meaning making?

RF: I dig deep into this question in Reading with the New Frankfurt School and try to carve out a path between what I see as two options. The first is overriding the first-person perspectives of others via theory (treating these perspectives as nothing more than symptoms of ideology, or discourse, or whatever), which I find presumptuous and anti-democratic. The second is automatically accepting the first-person perspective of others as truth, which soon runs into problems. As Rahel Jaeggi puts it: “Are not the most preposterous conversions routinely accompanied by a claim to have finally found oneself?” Subjective experience can be a source of knowledge, but it can also miss things or get them badly wrong, as you point out in talking about your relation to your own book. The challenge—and it’s one that feminists have long wrestled with—is how to combine respect for the experience for others with the capacity to question such experience. And is it possible to do the latter without coming across as elitist or a know-it-all?

An aspect of postcritique that might explain the surge of interest in creative circles is that it leaves room for the intentions and agency of writers. During the heyday of theories about “the death of the author,” there was not much rapprochement between creative writers and literary theorists. After all, if the former are seen as unwitting symptoms of their historical moment, there would seem to be little point in consulting them. My own slant on postcritique tends to focus on how readers co-make texts, but it also recognizes the crucial role of authors—not as godlike creators but as key participants in a literary network, who have a powerful influence on how books are read, especially in the age of social media.

JY: As someone who released a book last year, I can definitely tell you that the author is painfully, terrifyingly alive in this era. And definitely not in a godlike way. More in the waking up early to say things you might later regret on the radio, posting into the void on X, writing personal essays that are adjacent to your novel, appearing at book festivals and awkwardly answering questions about why people should buy your book (when the truth is you really don’t think they should), explaining to your family the difference between fiction and autobiography, feeling exposed and embarrassed every time some poor soul tells you they have read your book. And this is if you’re lucky. You’re incredibly lucky if people read your book or have any interest in it whatsoever. So, I say that all of these things are painful and awkward while also acknowledging that they are beautiful and lovely and rare opportunities to share your work with people who are generous enough to want to engage with it.

What is so strange about the whole experience, though, is that all of these things (descriptions of writing routines, essays about what inspired the book, interviews, festival appearances) hinge on the idea that the author has access to some kind of essential knowledge of the book and that the reader should refer to this special understanding rather than make their own judgments. Yet I don’t think I necessarily understand my book more than a reader does. In fact, when people tell me things about my own book, I’m always surprised because I’ve totally forgotten what I wrote, and I kind of nod along, taking their word for it. I don’t imagine this is the same for you, is it? Or are you regularly surprised by how other people understand your ideas or work?

RF: I’m frequently surprised by the mischaracterizations of my work! I’ve been heavily influenced by my training in German hermeneutics and social theory, yet I sometimes find myself depicted in the U.S. as an apolitical aesthete or as someone who believes in unmediated experience. Critics slot my arguments into what they already know rather than paying attention to what I actually write. I’m baffled, for example, to see myself described as “anti-theory” when all my books make theoretical arguments and draw on philosophical thought. I have criticized some forms of theory that dominate literary studies, but I am certainly not anti-theory, though I do think theory must be leavened by attention to the granular details of both literature and life.

JY: For me, postcritique was and is incredibly important as a political as well as creative and academic practice. I can’t disentangle any one of these three things from each other. A lot has been written now about how exhausting it is for writers of color to be told again and again that they should be centering their racial trauma when working with white editors or institutions. The same could be said of academics of color—Rey Chow wrote about this double bind best when she described the experience of being an Asian scholar in a historically white institution as a form of masochism.

I came to your work weary from feeling that I had to again and again practice critiques that centered around my own identity. And while this was really important in many ways and still is, I needed a practice like postcritique, one that explicitly acknowledges that literature can, of course, cause us pain, but it can also cause us pleasure, and this is oftentimes why we come to it in the first place. Pleasure, especially aesthetic pleasure, feels very political to me as a person of color who sometimes felt like I had to talk constantly about what was hurting me. And actively pursuing pleasure in the act of interpreting texts is a form of resistance to me at times.

This is something I have always really appreciated about the way you describe our engagements with theory in the Uses of Literature/Limits of Critique/Hooked triad—how they can be embodied and joyful and a little random and dependent on the contexts we are in. The pleasure is in being at least momentarily out of control, to be transported beyond the usual confines of time and space, to not have the burden of agency heavy on your back. It’s the same with critical theory: you’re being rearranged by something outside of yourself and, as you write in The Limits of Critique, it’s almost a little religious that way.

RF: I like your account of being transported by theory, the sense of “being rearranged by something outside yourself.” That phrase really resonates with me. A commitment to theory is another form of attachment, not a transcending of attachments. As such, it can be incredibly exhilarating as well as enlightening. When I was a graduate student, it was my main source of intellectual pleasure. Yet academic theory does not transcend everyday life, as scholars sometimes like to imagine, but constitutes a set of entrenched norms, routines, totems, tics and quirks.

Your novel shows this very clearly. The narrator of But the Girl is supposed to be writing a dissertation on Sylvia Plath and postcolonial theory, both of which she seems ambivalent about. I’m thinking here of irony-laden sentences such as the following: “‘Race’ felt like a crude, simplistic word said with brutish emotion but ‘postcolonial’ sounded theoretical and distant and impressive.” At the same time, your novel underscores that postcolonial theorists, and theorists more generally, may not be as distant from everyday reality as they think: that they are all too human. You are not your narrator, of course, and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts about postcolonial theories or other frameworks you’ve found generative.

JY: But the Girl’s protagonist is really interested in surfaces. There’s tension between what she should feel and how she does really feel that moves through the novel. At the time that she is working, she recognizes the way the word “race” makes those around her uncomfortable, but “postcolonial” has a really different affect. What she really wants is to be able to read and write about her own experiences in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s from a distance or about some other person.

When I was a Ph.D. student, I felt acutely that I wanted to write critical work with a strong sense of my experiential knowledge of “the postcolonial” or of the raced body and not as if these things were floating in some other sphere that was completely apart from me. What stopped me from doing this was the sense that when you’re already a scholar or writer of color your voice is automatically already limited to the subjective, autobiographical, puny, pitiful little letter “I.” As Vietnamese filmmaker and theorist Trinh Minh-ha writes, “The minor-ity’s voice is always personal; that of the major-ity, always impersonal.” But I think reading the philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff helped me rethink this. She and Satya P. Mohanty write that “minoritized peoples often use subjective experience to criticize and rewrite dominant and oppressive narratives” because the “legitimacy of some subjective experiences … is based on the objective location of people in society; in many crucial instances, ‘experiences’ are not unfathomable inner phenomena but rather disguised explanations of social relations, and they can be evaluated as such.”

As far as “frameworks” go, Alcoff and Minh-ha (and also Sara Ahmed and bell hooks) were really crucial for me. Their work helped me understand that rather than striving to depersonalize this “personal voice,” to appropriate the voice of so-called impersonal voice of the majority, it makes more sense to admit and affirm the subjective experience as a form of theory. When applied to texts, this looks at lot like what feminist scholars like Susan Fraiman, Lisa Ruddick and yourself are writing about—the idea of moving away from the cool, detached pose of the critic and instead acknowledging the sometimes idiosyncratic, intimate, deeply individual attachments we all bring to reading.

I feel like the postcritical lens has particular potential for enmeshment with the embodied and racial lens because it both acknowledges the personal experiences that we come to texts with and feels like a less controlling way of approaching interpretation. For me, the postcritical is one way of finding that language or, at the very least, thinking about the necessity of that language. So, my research became about reading texts through the lens of race and gender and the postcritical. How do you think postcritical theories might intersect with theories of race and gender and other kinds of embodied identity?

RF: There are a number of what you could call elective affinities, but one difference might be that identity has been a foundational concept in race and gender studies, even when it’s being deconstructed or subverted. One of the potential problems of the term, though, is that it can blur the distinction between identities and identifications: that is to say, between inhabiting a social category—being marked as raced, gendered, etc.—and one’s first-person relation to that category. It’s not just that we have multiple identities, as theories of intersectionality would have it, but that one’s awareness of, and attachment to, those identities can vary dramatically. For example, I’ve experienced unfair advantages due to my race as well as disadvantages due to my gender and class of origin. Yet I have always felt more classed than gendered—class simply is more visible and matters more to me—and this remains true even though I would now probably count as upper-middle-class and have published several books of feminist criticism and theory.

“Attachment”—the foundational concept in my own version of postcritique—might offer another way of thinking about political identifications. I should stress that attachment is not just a psychological or a “positive” term but refers to anything that matters to us, including ethical, political and intellectual commitments. Such ties can be short-term or they can last a lifetime, but they are, importantly, co-made—influenced by a variety of factors, including the contingencies of one’s own biography as well as the vocabularies and frameworks of interpretation that are available.

This seems especially pertinent to the experience of reading. As you mentioned earlier, I’ve long been interested in the aesthetics and politics of recognition—how literature can cater to the desire to see aspects of one’s own being in the world acknowledged and validated. Yet it is also common for attachments to form along other lines. Perhaps I am captivated by an author’s style or find myself drawn to the overall mood or atmosphere of a novel. These are all forms of attachment made possible by literature; I’ve never understood why we are supposed to take sides and see one as inherently better than another.

JY: I see race or gender not as essential but as experiential. In other words, it would be impossible for me to understand the world around me and how it responds to me (and how I should respond to it) without having a clear sense of how, as Alcoff writes, my “subjective experience” is constantly shaped by my “objective location.” I don’t know if this is an attachment, even though I see that attachment is not a wholly “positive” bond in your definition of it because, of course, I don’t have a choice in experiencing my body as raced in the world. In fact, if I had a choice, I oftentimes wouldn’t want to experience what comes with that at all.

I think you are right, though, that attachment can form along all kinds of lines. Particularly pertinent to our discussion is the way that people of color have historically had to feel unlikely attachments to all sorts of people in order to read and recognize themselves into texts that didn’t at all recognize them or even misrecognized and misread them. This is the conundrum of my novel. The central character, Girl, sees herself in Esther Greenwood and has this deep, complicated attachment to her as a character, but Esther Greenwood doesn’t see her or people of color more generally. In fact, early on in The Bell Jar, as Esther Greenwood stumbles home from a dissolute night out in New York, she sees a “big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman” staring at her in the elevator. After a moment, she realizes “it was only me, of course.” This line—“It was only me, of course”—is sort of the conversation Girl keeps having back and forth with The Bell Jar.

RF: I’m thinking that theory and criticism need to become more responsive to new forms of fiction and creative nonfiction. The mid-twentieth-century stress on a meticulous and painstaking practice of close reading was a good fit for the literature of high modernism. The poststructuralist theories of the Eighties and Nineties had obvious affinities to the highly self-conscious metafiction that was a hallmark of postmodernism. The field of contemporary literature looks rather different. The French critic Alexandre Gefen has an interesting new book called Repair the World, in which he talks about the cultural shift toward a more pragmatic view of literature as a means of self-understanding and self-fashioning—as being reparative rather than emancipatory. Literature, in other words, is increasingly serving therapeutic and ethical ends, connecting to the world rather than assuming a haughty distance from it. I am not suggesting that we endorse every aspect of this vibe shift, to use my students’ favorite phrase, but I think we need to engage with it in a way that is not reductive—treating it as just another ruse of capitalism, for example—but that asks what possible needs it might be fulfilling for authors and readers. Here postcritique might have something valuable to offer.