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It is now just over twenty-five years since Fredric Jameson published The Political Unconscious and provided an agenda for literary interpretation that still sets many of the terms of our discipline. Jameson presented symptomatic reading as an interpretive method in which what a text means lies in what it does not say, which can then be used to rewrite the text in terms of a master code. By disclosing the absent cause that structures the text’s inclusions and exclusions, the critic restores to the surface the history that the text represses.

A host of critical schools generated multiple possibilities for what that repressed material could be. The common denominator with The Political Unconscious was the sense that critical interpretation at its best points the reader to what the text itself does not manifest.

This conference will meditate on the ways we read now and the place of symptomatic reading today. Is symptomatic reading, which locates meaning in the gaps between a text’s surface and its depth, still the dominant mode of literary criticism? If so, what are its strengths and limitations? Can we distinguish between the surface of a text and its depth? Conversely, are symptoms always symptoms of occult processes? What textual symptoms might be expressly visible, like those of a broken leg?

Papers will also pose more fundamental questions. Is interpretation itself, asking what a text means, still the dominant method in literary studies? Should it be? And if symptomatic reading is no longer the shared method of literary critics, what new ways of thinking about literature are now in circulation or emerging, and what might they make possible? Some of the most important new approaches to literature today—archival, material, digital, naïve, literal, “just”—attend precisely to what Jameson might define as the “inert givens” of the text. Do these models overturn or move beyond the surface/depth binary, or reproduce it in symptomatic formations that have not yet been adequately interpreted?