Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin: Counterfactuals? The Art of the Possible in Fiction and History from Antiquity to 1800

Workshop 2014/2015

Counterfactuals? The Art of the Possible in Fiction and History from Antiquity to 1800

07.–08. Mai 2015

How might history have otherwise unfolded? What would have happened had the Battle of Agincourt or the Second World War been different from what history has recorded?

Our present era is familiar with thought experiments that have given rise to many a fictional work and theoretical reflection both in terms of fictional theory (e.g. Dolezel 2011) and philosophy (notably Lewis 1973). But what about previous eras, in particular that period which goes by the name of “early modern,” roughly extending from 1500 to 1800? Whether in the form of novels or plays, how far should fiction go in its manipulation of the historical record?

Reflecting on anachronism (Was Virgil wrong in having Dido and Aeneas meet when they lived some centuries apart?) and the debates over a poet’s artistic license in relation to history reveal that this question was not at all alien to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But one generally approaches this epoch in presupposing a certain indifference on the part of early modern man with respect to historical exactitude and in distinguishing fact from fiction.

Instead we propose to understand historical manipulation as a laboratory of the possible. In seeking to discover what might be the differences – if any – between the early moderns and our contemporary counterfactual literature, we are interested in time travel, alternative histories, science fiction, the telescoping of worlds (when individuals from different epochs cross paths) and in paradoxes and time warps. What conceptions of history do they presuppose? What are their implications for the status of fiction, of allegory, and of reference to the real world?