Difference between revisions of "Strategic presentism"

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(Created page with "*Presentism **bad when the present idea is mapped onto the past, when anachronistic **strategic: if we allow ourselves a little of it, we can do something important (Dickens w...")
 
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Latest revision as of 14:21, 26 September 2017

  • Presentism
    • bad when the present idea is mapped onto the past, when anachronistic
    • strategic: if we allow ourselves a little of it, we can do something important (Dickens wouldn't ask this question but I know I'm doing it) - leveraging the gap to make a point about our moment or the gap ourselves
    • transparent presentism: historicizing but answering "So what" "Why does it matter now?"
    • explicitly being historicist b/c you know it would've been different to be a woman then but needing to do a lot of work to figure out what's different, the actual modes of their resistance; it's natural for Victorian "feminists" to think with the cognitive essential difference between biological senses, for example
    • reading anachronistically is interesting because it tells us something about now, e.g., Wolf Hall tells us about 2000 rather than 1525 (the historicist argument)
    • but being self-conscious about the danger of presentism: in order to dramatize aspects of this society I couldn't do otherwise, I will have people say "fuck" in Deadwood (because C19 profanity is hard to comprehend for us b/c it's so much about blasphemy)