This essay examines the relationship between modernist formal experimentation and rehabilitative futurism, the modern cultural fantasy of a hygienic future in which all illness and disability have been eradicated. Through a reading of Kenneth Burke’s early essay collection Counter-Statement (1931) and his first and only novel, Towards a Better Life (1932), it traces the development both of Burke’s notion of literature as “medicine” or “equipment for living” and of modernist literature as a particular kind of antinomian remedy that subverts the norms of health. Drawing on these ideas, this essay argues that modernist literature has the transgressive capacity to alter readers’ orientation toward the good life and the horizon of what is possible for acting toward the creation of a future society in which disability can flourish.