The topic of this class will the genre of alternate history or counterfactual narratives. The course will both explore the roots of the genre or subgenre within science fiction more generally, and consider the recent mainstream literary interest in it (by writers like Roth or Chabon). We will be especially interested in the assumptions about history that are implicit in different versions of this subgenre, as well as in defining the different kinds of cultural and ideological work that alternate history can perform. For instance, alternate histories can undermine the authority of dominant historical narratives, especially when that authority derives from asserting that historical events demonstrate a “manifest destiny” or teleology, while at the same time alternate histories can reassert the inevitability of historical events. What is the value of constructing a patently incorrect version of past historical events?

We will read some criticism and some classic alternate history stories (possibly from Turtledove and Greenberg’s Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century or Greenberg and Silverberg’s The Way It Wasn’t), along with some readings in historical precursors to alternate history, by writers like Charles Brockden Brown. The primary readings for the course will be drawn from this list (we will not read all of these books):
Joanna Russ, The Female Man; Octavia Butler, Kindred; William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine; Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union; Steven Barnes’s Lion’s Blood or Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots or Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt; Paul Di Filippo’s Lost Pages; and Jo Walton’s Farthing.

Requirments for the course are likely to include one shorter interpretive essay and one longer research paper.