Experiments in Historical Fiction

0.5 credits · Graduate

"Where has all the clarity gone, all the naturalness and purity of that connection between life and history?" (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the use and abuse of history for life) "...thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country" (Saleem Sinai, protagonist of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children) We will examine at the outset how the genre of "historical fiction" has traditionally and self-consciously followed particular (realist) conventions about the relationships between the past and the present, about the distance between historical and fictional figures, and about the objective character of the historical record. This sets the stage for our reading of four postmodern (American, Czech, Chilean, and German) novels, each of which deconstructs these conventions and opens up an array of complex and controversial issues concerning the nature of what many thinkers assert is the "natural" connection between history and storytelling. Some knowledge of the historical and political contexts of the primary texts will be useful (Communist Eastern Europe and the Cold War in the cases of Kundera and Wolf, the Pinochet dictatorship in the case of Allende; general historical reference points by all of the writers), but the main object of study is the literary engagement with the nature of history as it relates to such things as desire, memory, politics, and the literary tradition.