One of the best jokes in Whit Stillman‘s 1994 comedy Barcelona could apply to much academic writing of the past half-century. Fred, a naval officer who is a new arrival in Europe, asks his expatriate cousin Ted about something he noticed in the books he has been reading while waiting for the fleet to arrive. “One of the things that keeps popping up is about ‘subtext.’ Plays, novels, songs — they all have a ‘subtext,’ which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind. So subtext we know,” Fred says. “But what do you call the message or meaning that’s right there on the surface, completely open and obvious? They never talk about that. What do you call what’s above the subtext?”