Presentifying nature: the descriptive enunciates of the national environment as presence effects in the writing of the nineteenth-century history

Abstract

This article investigates the writing of nineteenth-century national historiography. For this purpose, I selected as object of research the descriptive procedures included in the historical works. These descriptions, I believe, can be exploited as attempts of presentification, as they reveal the desire to place the object described before the eyes of the reader. It is a strategy that involved the construction of the historiographical reasoning. I interpret this desire through the epistemology of production of presence, as stipulated by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. To illustrate the reasoning, I analyze Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen’s description of Rio de Janeiro, as part of the work História geral do Brazil (1854-1857).