presentify

present singular third person presentifies · participle present presentifying · participle past presentified · past presentified

1. ambitransitiveto make something (especially from the past) appear present or immediately relevant

   Drama is actually there; poetry attempts to presentify the absent; prose just sits around, unobtrusive-like.

   1993, James Nielson, Unread Herrings, page 56

   2 more examples

   [...] nevertheless we still have not advanced far beyond the modification of Goethe’s pronouncement undertaken already by Schiller: “that literary art compels even the epic poet to presentify, or present as present, that which has happened”

   1973, Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, page 65

   As I will demonstrate through close examination of Hopkins’s novels, the texts intervene in the dominating revisionist and pastifying discourse and narratively presentify America’s antebellum past by illustrating slavery’s lasting effects on a post-Reconstruction present.

   2022, JoAnn Pavletich, Yours for Humanity: New Essays on Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, page 154

   Antonyms: pastify, absentify