pastness

As Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra define, postfeminism entails "a set of assumptions, widely disseminated within popular media forms, having to do with the 'pastness' of feminism, whether that supposed pastness is merely noted, mourned, or celebrated" (2007:1).

Though Gitelman is interested primarily in the sense of newness, she comments on media and pastness as well in ways that are suggestive for the aesthetics of anachronistic genres: "Like old art, old media remain meaningful.

Instead, the turn to practice rests on more amorphous notions that past usage has its own legitimacy, if not authority, based on its very pastness. Much reliance on historical practice in this area, I suggest, invokes a form of prescription.

On the other hand, archival footage is often cited to create, as Baron (2014) suggests, an experience of archivalness and a feeling of pastness without specific temporal referent.

Thus emerges a future as a paradoxical replication of "a still unprocessed past"--"'the coming times' not just in relation to the unalterable past that has produced them, but as themselves a pastness, a lostness, located in an emergent future" (Yeats and Afterwords 5).

In the ruin, one sees an equivocal pastness coexisting with the present, the former undoing the seeming immediacy of the latter, both half absent.

When (1) TS Eliot wrote that matured artistic talent requires a sense of both the presence and pastness of the past, he was not constructing a new concept, but rather, presenting in a masterful phrase a fundamental facet of literary history: the importance of intellectual, cultural and authorial genealogy.

The ghostly impression of a rotary telephone or even an incandescent light bulb accentuates its 'pastness'.

Owens is making his critique of cultural elitism the occasion for a forceful response to the current economic crisis, brought into relief against the grammatical ambiguity and figural opacity of the poem (what is the antecedent of "they," after all?) through an ordinary and direct statement that simply says "no." No romantic, vatic rhetoric or singularized voice of the collective is necessary: a vague but inclusive subject and a negative assertion that shifts intentionally to the future tense is sufficient to register the populist defiance and will that makes the ballad a vital touchstone for political poetry, not just a "thing shot through with pastness."

What Eliot understood by 'historical sense' was the developed consciousness "not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence"; it "compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order" (Eliot 1920: 44).

Here, Lopez points out the materiality of the audio medium by emphasizing how the track's "cracks, hisses, and pops" frame its sense of historical pastness. Lopez's book is filled with these important self-reflexive moments, which bring us into the vast amount of archival research that Lopez personally conducted in the process of writing this book.

(5) The definition offered by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra in their recent anthology, Interrogating Post-feminism, is particularly relevant to the approach taken here: 'Post-feminism broadly encompasses a set of assumptions, widely disseminated within popular media forms, having to do with the "pastness" of feminism, whether that supposed pastness is merely noted, mourned or celebrated.' (6) This notion of the 'pastness' of feminism is crucial to the context of Lost in Austen, which I argue represents a post-feminist world in which the central objectives of feminism (freedom of choice in terms of career and relationship, financial and legal equality) appear to have been achieved.

MH: There is another prejudice in landscape-gazing that your book overcomes: the idea of erasure, of the pastness of the past.