Music of What Happens: AlternateHistories and Counterfactuals (LITR 3133 R)
Term: 2023-24 Academic Year Spring
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 American literary novelists Philip Roth and Michael Chabon published well-regarded novels of alternate history—The Plot Against America and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, respectively—earlier in this century. 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 University Press both published intellectually rigorous books on alternate history and counterfactual analysis in the