ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to current debates about “symptomatic reading” to rehabilitate an older form of pre-symptomatic literary analysis, which theorized literature’s activist use value in terms of a model of mechanical causality with an immanent logic of material causes and effects. The chapter experimentally remobilizes this instrumental (“mechanical”) logic of literary “means” and political “ends.” This older form and logic, the chapter argues, can help us reclaim parts of the literary-historical map that are eclipsed by the habitual privileging of formal complexity in literary studies. Against influential symptomatic readers such as the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, the chapter directs readers toward neglected literary-theoretical models of historical causality that may once again prove artistically and politically useful.
