Safeguarding the Past:

“Presentist” Historicism

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Francesca Sawaya*

In recent years, we have seen a range of calls for the revitaliza- Realizing Capital:
tion of literary and cultural studies through transformation of our Financial and Psychic
Economies in Victorian
theoretical and methodological paradigms. One of the most recent is Form, Anna Kornbluh.
the “V21 Manifesto” of 2015 assembled by a Victorianist collective Fordham University
of scholars who work primarily in British studies. This document Press, 2014.
argues that Victorian literary and cultural studies is mired in
“positivist historicism” which is characterized by an “instrumentalist The Mediated Mind:
Affect, Ephemera, and
evisceration of humanistic ways of knowing.” As a corrective, the
Consumerism in the
V21 collective argues for “presentism.” The collective defines pres- Nineteenth Century,
entism, on the one hand, as the use of contemporary theoretical Susan Zieger. Fordham
methodologies to engage the Victorian past, but also as the recogni- University Press, 2018.
tion that “the world we inhabit bears the traces of the nineteenth cen-
tury.” Through “presentism,” the collective thereby hopes to
challenge the ways in which “Victorianists are our own and only
interlocutors. . . . . [and fail] . . . to imagine paths of argument com-
pelling to scholars who do not care about Victorians as Victorians.”
Presentism—what was once seen by many scholars as a bug in
historicism—now becomes, intriguingly, a feature.
As a nineteenth-century scholar who works primarily on US
texts, I admire the forthrightness and polemical energy of this call
for “presentism.” Indeed, that different forms of literary historicism
offer the possibility to meditate on the present has been one of its
most undertheorized and most enacted characteristics. In US literary
studies, for example, Jennifer Fleissner has repeatedly asked us to
take seriously the work of intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra
and his notion of the necessary, complex, and also problematic
transference that always occurs between past and present in the his-
torian’s work. Fleissner has carefully demonstrated how presentism

*Francesca Sawaya is Professor of English and American Studies at the College of

William & Mary. She is the author of Modern Women, Modern Work: Domesticity,
Professionalism, and American Writing (U of Pennsylvania P, 2004) and The
Difficult Art of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market
(U of Pennsylvania P, 2014)

American Literary History, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 301–311

doi:10.1093/alh/ajz009
Advance Access publication April 6, 2019
C The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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302 Safeguarding the Past

drives often diametrically opposed versions of historicism and has

argued for more self-reflexivity and theoretical rigor in the present-
ism of our historicisms (“Historicism Blues”; “Is Feminism a

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Historicism?”). In short, presentism has long been acknowledged by
some scholars as central to historicist work of all stamps, but V21’s
bracing call helps us return with renewed energy to the theoretical
and methodological questions and problems presentism poses.
At the same time, as The Rambling’s knowing, even tragicomic
commentary, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the V21
Manifesto,” suggests, the document is marked by its own present
and registers what Bruce Robbins described at the height of the cul-
ture wars as a professional “jeremiad” (19–21). The Rambling reads
the Manichean rhetoric of professional fallenness and worldliness
(“instrumentalist evisceration of humanistic ways of knowing”
[“Manifesto”]) as registering the jockeying that results from a brutal
job market for nineteenth-century scholars and the declining status
of professional expertise—specifically the declining value of our
field of expertise—nineteenth-century print text literacies. The
Rambling describes the difficult professional present to which it sug-
gests the V21 manifesto responds in this way: “It’s not just that we
. . . [Victorianists are] a joke according to new university policy that
emphasizes readings of three pages or less or that our students think
Trollope is a social-networking app for sex workers.”
My career has taken me from working-class and middle-class
state universities across the Midwest, West, and South. Over the
years, I have found it increasingly challenging to assign the long
texts of the nineteenth century, which require immersive reading
over extended periods of time. There are still students who are eager
to read these texts and find their form and content revelatory; many,
however, can’t make time in their financially precarious and busy
lives or are bored by the extended framing and logics of nineteenth-
century texts. Likewise, if the universities where I have worked are
any gauge, administrators have oddly enough focused on the cost of
books in the skyrocketing costs in higher education. Inadvertently or
not, the message sent to students and faculty alike is that big, thick
books (and reading) are somehow causing education to become
unaffordable. Here, of course, I am engaged in my own professional
jeremiad; and as my digital media and film studies colleagues might
point out, it would be equally true to note that students come to the
university with digital and filmic literacies that far exceed my own.
My larger point, then, is a simple one and not unrelated to the V21
manifesto—that different models of literacy are being promoted by
differently situated actors in our contemporary public sphere, and so
far, the outcome of that struggle has not been to renew attention to
the forms of textual literacy and immersive reading—whether
 American Literary History 303

historical, theoretical, or literary—that center on the nineteenth cen-

tury. For Robbins, himself a signatory to the V21 manifesto, profes-
sional jeremiads, despite their Manichean rhetoric, are helpful in

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revitalizing intellectual work. They show “how disciplines work,
how they manufacture vocations for themselves, how they shift from
one vocation or paradigm to another” (21). Can V21’s notion of
“presentism”—worked out more fully than it can be in a
manifesto—be helpful to those of us working in nineteenth-century
studies and aid us in better explaining to other scholars, as well as
students and universities, the significance of what we find there?
Can the bug in historicist studies become a feature? I think it can be
and that two recent books by scholars in the V21 collective, Anna
Kornbluh and Susan Zieger, demonstrate the promise and the prob-
lems that “presentism” can entail.
Both Kornbluh’s Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic
Economies in Victorian Form (2014) and Zieger’s The Mediated
Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth
Century (2018) provide ambitious, wide-scale arguments backed by
impressive erudition, theoretical sophistication, and meticulous close
readings. They are also very different, even oppositional, attesting to
the vitality of what the collective itself describes as its productive in-
ternal “disagreements.” Kornbluh focuses on the canonical literary
authors in British Victorian literary studies (Charles Dickens,
George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope), while demonstrating the links
between their texts and the canonical modernist ones of Karl Marx
and Sigmund Freud. Zieger, by contrast, focuses on mass culture,
print ephemera, and less clearly canonical texts (by Arthur Conan
Doyle, Wilkie Collins, George du Maurier, and Oscar Wilde).
Likewise, Kornbluh focuses on the abstract structure of modern
capitalism—financialization—and on its various rhetorical sleights
of hand, while Zieger focuses on the subjects in capitalism—
consumers and affect. Both are directly “presentist,” and their meth-
odologies have similar features, even as they are undergirded by
very different arguments.
In this review, I cannot do justice to the richness of detail in
these books nor can I track all their invigorating and fascinating dif-
ferences. I can, however, examine the ways presentism works use-
fully and problematically in the overall arguments of these two
books. Specifically I contend that their strength is to seize on abso-
lutely vital issues in our present and trace their roots to the Victorian
period in order to reinvigorate our perspective on the nineteenth cen-
tury. For Kornbluh, this means focusing on the persistent and persis-
tently devastating myths of capitalism, and for Zieger, on elitist and
dystopian accounts of mass culture. The weakness of these studies is
that their polemics about the pastness of the present (as Zieger puts
304 Safeguarding the Past

it, “We have seen it all before” [213]) result in methodologies that
direct their arguments to specialists only and (unnecessarily) avoid
questions about relations of production—whether in the Victorian

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period or our own.
Kornbluh’s argument is particularly important and timely, and
she frames it clearly and well. She posits that in the mid-Victorian
period, and with financialization (“the transition to an economy in
which the speculative begetting of money from money supersedes
the industrial production and consumption of goods”), an era of
“regular, constant [economic] crisis” ensued (1). The result was that
it became increasingly difficult “to realize”—in all senses of the
word—what constituted both reality and capital (2). Political econo-
mists and financial journalists subsequently developed the notion of
“fictitious capital,” but it was Victorian novelists who especially lev-
eraged that concept in productive ways (2). “Fictitious capital,”
Kornbluh explains, “signals not a firm classification, but rather the
very impossibility of firm classification, the very violation of
class—category, but also, for this matter, caste—incited by the fi-
nancial revolution” (6). For Kornbluh, while financial journalists
and political economists at first critically explored the “charismatic
trope” of fictitious capital, in the end, they displaced their concerns
with the “literally unbelievable” workings of capital onto the notion
of “psychic economy” (6, 8, 9). Evading structural analyses of the
working of capital, these writers and thinkers “normalize[d]” its
operations—and the necessity of ongoing crisis—by focusing on
“substitute ground: a psyche whose intrinsic economy of unlimited
desires and unpredictable vacillations could be located as the final
cause of a volatile economy” (9). Realist literary authors, by con-
trast, questioned this displacement: they both explored its manifesta-
tions and indicted it for its intellectual and ethical emptiness.
Kornbluh insists on a strict distinction between what she calls
“literary thinking” and discourse: “To the historicist’s reduction of
literature to discourse, I oppose deconstruction’s insistence on the ir-
reducibility of tropes to intuitive ideas, and I work instead to en-
counter the material and process of literary thinking” (13). She calls
her mode of analysis “financial formalism,” one “that reads literary
form’s critical thinking about the historically specific material and
conceptual question of finance,” thereby foregrounding “the contem-
plative agency leveraged by literature” (15). Kornbluh’s valorization
of “literary thinking” is closely connected to an impassioned defense
of realism, a literary form that Marxists and new historicists ex-
plored extensively in the 1980s and 1990s. Those critics, Kornbluh
argues, saw literary realism as a “‘reification of the status quo’”
(Patrick Brantlinger, qtd. in Kornbluh 12). By contrast, she argues
that realism is “the over-determined representation of unsolvable
 American Literary History 305

dilemmas that disrupt the integration of reality” (4). In making this

claim she carefully describes her focus as being on financialization,
with literary realists “insightful[ly] framing” the “problems” of that

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historical process and “prob[ing] many of its effects” (4, 9). Literary
realists, she argues, did so primarily through their use of “the tropes
of personification and metalepsis” (4). Particularly helpful is
Kornbluh’s analysis of metalepsis, of the ways that effects are
substituted for causes, but in any case, her trope-centered account of
financialization adds a new vantage point from which to think about
the narratives and rhetoric of capitalist ideologues.
That the critique of capitalism was displaced in the nineteenth
century and continues to be displaced quite frequently through psy-
chologism; that nineteenth-century literary writers embedded the
issues that emerged from such psychologism in their works and
thereby provide an instructive if disorienting picture of the unreality
of financialization as it occurred; and that deconstructive or rhetori-
cal modes of analysis prove valuable in reading both the fictions of
capitalism and the fictions about capitalism—these are all important
arguments. Why then does the book feel so narrowly specialist, a
book that is directed not simply to Victorianists, but really—since
she fails to engage American or transatlantic realist criticism—only
to British Victorianists? Quite simply, the book’s argument is con-
stricted by its evidentiary base and the way it renders exclusive its
object of study. To rely solely on what is described as uniquely
“literary,” and to rely solely on literary modes of reading—on metic-
ulous tracings out of the workings of metalepsis and
personification—with no engagement with the question of how such
formulations were produced, how they engaged other critical formu-
lations within or across other sectors of society, what other modes of
reading were powerfully productive—makes the book’s argument
feel airless and more limited than it could be or should be.
There is something poignant in Kornbluh’s defense of the ex-
clusivity of “literary thinking” in our present moment:

To read literature, to be open to how literature thinks, is to pose

that quintessential Dickensian question, “what connexion can
there be?”: what connection exists between the voices, plots,
motifs, temporalities, and images that are mobilized within one
bounded work? Form, as forum for these elective affinities and
flattering contrasts, wields a conceptual agency—an agency for
assembling concepts while simultaneously defamiliarizing
them—for relating without reifying, for weaving a loose and
gossamer web. (15–16)
306 Safeguarding the Past

Such a lyrical defense of “literary thinking” cannot but appeal to lit-

erature professors, since it acknowledges the power of forms of liter-
acy and literariness that have illuminated and transformed our

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consciousness. But do only texts like those of Dickens, Eliot,
Trollope, Marx, and Freud have “conceptual agency” and promote
“contemplative agency” in relation to capital (16, 15)? Are close
and meticulous reworkings and/or readings of metalepsis and per-
sonification in “literary” narrative or “literary” nonfiction really the
only way that human beings have come to an understanding of and
critique of the unreality of capital? Surely not.
Most puzzling here is that this move Kornbluh makes in estab-
lishing “literary thinking” as an exclusive domain is utterly unneces-
sary to make her important points about “fictitious capital” and
“psychic economy.”1 She insists on the exclusive “sagacity” of liter-
ature, and in doing so, she has to avoid the history of the production
of that category (9). Such avoidance apparently has more to do with
a polemical response to previous literary historicisms about realism
than with any necessity immanent in her argument. As noted,
Kornbluh argues that a previous generation of historicist critics saw
realism as enforcing, even enshrining, the status quo. This was also
true in the US context in some of the more Foucauldian-inspired
accounts of literary realism. For Americanists, for example, there
was Walter Benn Michaels’s important but exasperatingly tautologi-
cal and deterministic The Gold Standard and the Logic of
Naturalism (1987). That famous study might well be seen as a pre-
cursor text to Kornbluh’s “financial formalism,” but it is also pre-
cisely the kind of text that has provoked Kornbluh’s defense of the
exclusive status of the “literary” and her refusal to engage questions
about the production of that category.2
Deterministic historicist accounts of production in realism,
however, have not been universal. As Catherine Gallagher and
Stephen Greenblatt have argued, the historicist turn in literary stud-
ies was galvanized by many different “presents,” not just that of de-
terministic Marxism or Foucauldianism. It was also inspired by the
social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the opening of the univer-
sity to students from different subject positions and backgrounds,
and the model that an emergent social history provided (9–12).
Differentials of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and locatedness (pe-
riphery/metropole)—within nineteenth-century literary culture—
were therefore also central in debates about literary realism. These
historicist accounts were often more open-ended and dialectical and
asked what kinds of knowledge and culture are produced in different
subject positions and locations, as well as what kind of dialogue and
movement occurred across and between them. One thinks here of
two brilliant classics: Kenneth Warren’s account of the relation
 American Literary History 307

between race and realism, Black and White Strangers (1993), and
Amy Kaplan’s of class and realism, The Social Construction of
American Realism (1988). These are, of course, Americanist argu-

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ments about realism, and if there is one thing that Kornbluh’s book
strongly suggests, despite three decades of calls for transatlantic
work, Americanist and British nineteenth-century literary scholars
are not really even speaking to each other, whether or not they are
speaking to broader audiences.
Nonetheless, and most importantly, Kornbluh might have
reflected more deeply on the production of the “literary” and its
modes of reading. Phillip Barrish, again in the American context,
pointed out long ago that debates within nineteenth-century realism
about literature have continued to structure contemporary debates
about theoretical models for reading it. Barrish reflected on the ways
in which opposed historicist and deconstructive theoretical models
of reading in literary and cultural studies each dramatically claim
“special intimacy with materiality” (8). Recall here Kornbluh’s po-
lemic that “To the historicist’s reduction of literature to discourse, I
oppose deconstruction’s insistence on the irreducibility of tropes to
intuitive ideas, and I work instead to encounter the material and pro-
cess of literary thinking” (13, emphasis added). Barrish argued that
“More-materialist-than-thou” deconstructive as well as historicist
arguments are central to creating cultural capital in our debates as
literary scholars and are inherited from debates about the status of
the “literary” amongst the realists in the nineteenth century (147).
One need not agree completely with all aspects of Barrish’s argu-
ment to agree with his larger claim that self-reflexivity and self-
critique about the history of the production of our object of study
and our modes of reading enrich and deepen our understanding of
both.
It is this latter issue, the absence of histories of production—
both in terms of the object of study and in terms of methodology—
that links Kornbluh and Zieger’s quite different books. At first,
Zieger’s book appears to be in direct, even conflictual dialogue with
Kornbluh, disputing the latter’s methodological splitting off of the
literary from “discourse” more generally. Zieger writes, “This book
unapologetically elevates . . . trivial ephemera to critical attention”
and demonstrates how “mass print called forth a range of literacies,
not limited to fluent, solitary, focused reading” (2). She describes
what she sees as the “various double binds” of “many well-
intentioned progressive literary critics” who “conduct . . . elaborate
close readings of popular novels that their original readers were un-
likely to have performed, and fail . . . to study the ephemeral materi-
als that truly meant something to millions of people” (13). Implicitly
criticizing the kind of “literary” analysis that Kornbluh advocates,
308 Safeguarding the Past

Zieger focuses on ephemera—especially print ephemera—and the

kinds of affect they produced, which she argues are quite different
than those that “fluent, solitary, focused reading” yields (2).

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Working against the claims of literature as an exclusive do-
main and against exclusively “literary” modes of reading, Zieger
also acts to counter two modes of interpretation in media studies: on
the one hand, what she calls “paranoid readings that quickly explain
away affective phenomena with grand narratives,” and on the other,
“quantitative studies . . . [that] re-create the politics of mass print
production, regulation, and distribution” but efface affect (10).
Zieger instead hopes to give “media consumption a face” (10), to
open up the “embodied, material, and situated” “everyday experi-
ences” of nineteenth-century mass media consumers (9). She there-
fore relies on a methodology that she describes as “neutral
description and scene-setting” (9). She especially seeks to “renovate
banal and even irrational states of mind” against “the image of the
mindless mass cultural consumer” created by Marxists (12), whether
by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, or by Walter Benjamin,
who created more nuanced but likewise “imperfect” accounts (11).
Why does a book with such a different theoretical apparatus,
methodology, and evidentiary base than Kornbluh’s end up nonethe-
less feeling, again, so narrowly specialist, restricted not simply to
Victorianists, but really only to British Victorianists? Zieger’s theo-
retical commitments are beautifully articulated and her methodology
of “neutral description and scene-setting” is provocative, but again
what both come to mean as the book proceeds is the identification of
certain ephemeral objects and/or affects which are then explored
more deeply through meticulous close readings of primarily literary
texts—albeit more middlebrow literary texts than Kornbluh’s (9).
Part of the problem here is that Zieger’s affect archive presents cer-
tain conceptual difficulties. As the historian Susan Matt points out,
to trace the affects and/or emotions in the past, and particularly to
try to do so from below, one frequently must rely on written texts
and accounts that have been preserved by those from above. This in
no way diminishes what Zieger attempts to do, though one wishes
she had reflected more on this issue. Yet there is a shared problem
with Kornbluh that can be related to the compelling, but complex,
force of presentism for the discipline of nineteenth-century literary
and cultural studies in this historical juncture. In her conclusion,
Zieger writes that “the broad similarities . . . between nineteenth-
century media consumption and our own should relieve our angst.
We have seen it all before” (213). Such polemical presentism avoids
the necessity to explore, for example, accounts of the dynamics of
production in Victorian print culture and their similarity to or differ-
ence from (for example) contemporary transnational media
 American Literary History 309

conglomerates and the security state. My angst, quite frankly, was

not relieved. I don’t recognize the Victorianness of our present to
which Zieger so dismissively gestures. Likewise, and from a

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completely different vantage point, I did not recognize Kornbluh’s
present in which she asserts “economists and politicians,” still
“enshrine” “psychology,” rather than structure in their accounts of
capitalism (156). It’s true of some economists and politicians; it’s
not true of others who have moved away from psychologism into
powerful, even historicist, accounts of how capitalist economies re-
produce structural inequality.3 [T]he “presentism”
In other words, the “presentism” of two such different histori- of two such different
cist texts with two completely different theoretical paradigms and historicist texts with
two completely
methodologies seem to have at their heart a desire to enshrine different theoretical
“Victorian” texts (albeit of different kinds) as uniquely testifying to paradigms and
our “Victorian” present, to safeguard our privileged objects and methodologies seem
methodologies. For reasons that appear to have more to do with to have at their heart
debates within literary and cultural studies about methodology than a desire to enshrine
“Victorian” texts . . .
as necessities immanent within their important arguments, both
as uniquely testifying
Kornbluh and Zieger avoid any account of production in the past or to our “Victorian”
present. They thereby avoid the so-called hermeneutics of suspicion present, to safeguard
of a previous generation of literary historicist presentisms, which our privileged
has been seen (both accurately and inaccurately) as “reduc[ing]” objects and
(Kornbluh 13) the documents and experiences of the past (and pre- methodologies.
sent) to production and thus to “discourse” or “ideology.”
At the same time, such avoidance of production necessarily
diminishes the possibility for dialectical accounts of both the past
and the present, and likewise debate and discussion with other disci-
plines about how we constitute our archives and methodologies.
LaCapra has argued that too-deeply presentist accounts of the past
represent not merely transference, but “narcissistic infatuation” and
“subjectivist aggression” (63, 64). Neither of these erudite and dili-
gent books fit this description. Nonetheless, there is a way in which
the complexly contestatory dynamics of both the past and present
are (unnecessarily) flattened out in these books by the enshrining of
the nineteenth-century archive and “literary” modes of analysis.
If these two texts of the V21 collective are any example of the
call to “presentism,” we have been given much to think about in
terms of both our accounts of the nineteenth century and our meth-
ods of reading the past. Yet in thinking about our past and present,
we must not avoid accounts of relations of production. In other
words, we must not presume our archives and reading methods are
the only “sagaci[ious]” ones or that what Sianne Ngai might call the
“ugly feelings” of “suspicion” or “angst” must be avoided to argue
for the value of what we do. I do think we can talk more effectively
to other scholars, as well as our students and universities, about the
310 Safeguarding the Past

continuing relevance of the nineteenth century in the present, but we

need to be self-reflexive and self-critical and avoid succumbing to
the presumption that our texts and our forms of knowledge, our

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accounts of past and present, are the only ones that matter in the
present.

Notes

1. For example, deconstructive methodologies have not necessarily privileged the

literary, but instead seeing the workings of language itself as providing tools of
demystification.

2. Kornbluh devotes a short and neutrally descriptive footnote to this precursor

work (176–77n12).

3. The work of Emmanuel Saez, Raj Chetty, and Thomas Piketty that has received
so much mainstream attention in the last decade, as well as the well-regarded eco-
nomic journalism of John Lanchester and the Nobel prize winner, Paul Krugman, do
not reduce capitalism to psychologism and is often centered on tracing historical pat-
terns. They may not have exactly the same account of “fictitious capital” that
Kornbluh does, but their work would invigorate her discussion of that formation in
both the past and the present. Likewise, I kept waiting to hear from Kornbluh about
the renewed interest in the work of the economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi—
especially in England. Polanyi’s analyses during the Cold War of the “utopian” fic-
tions of capitalism is closely related to Kornbluh’s and is receiving renewed attention
by the Labour Party in England (see Polanyi, The Great Transformation [1944]
p. 138). In short, different disciplines and their debates, as well as their archives, can
provide parallel if different evidentiary bases and methodologies. From another an-
gle, current Marxist and Marxist-informed work in the humanities on the relation of
subjectivity and the structures of capitalism (in various ways the work of Ann
Cvetkovich, Maurizio Lazzarato, Ngai, and Franco Berardi) create much more dia-
lectical accounts of the relation of “fictitious capital” to “psychic economy” than the
tropes of metalepsis, and personification allow for and would, again, invigorate
Kornbluh’s account.

Works Cited

“I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the ——. “Is Feminism a Historicism?”

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Fleissner, Jennifer. “Historicism Blues.”
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Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism.
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Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction
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Kornbluh, Anna. Realizing Capital:
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LaCapra, Dominick. Rethinking
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