Strategic presentism
From Commonplace Book
- 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)
