The Music of What Happens::Alternate Histories/Counterfactuals (LITR 3133 R)
Term: 2015-2016 Academic Year Fall
Description
The alternate history, which imagines a different present or future originating in a point of divergence from our actual history—a branching point in the past—is both an increasingly popular form of genre fiction and a decreasingly disreputable form of analysis in history and the social sciences. While fictions of alternate history were, until very recently, only a subgenre of science fiction, celebrated “literary” novelists (Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, and Colson Whithead, among others) have, within the last decade and a half, written well-regarded novels of alternate history: The Plot Against America, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and The Underground Railroad. Similarly, while counterfactual historical speculation is at least as old as Livy, academic historians have, until recently, scorned the practice as a vulgar parlor game; but this is beginning to change. In the early 1990s, Cambridge University Press and Princeton both published intellectually rigorous books on alternate hist