2.What distinctions are there between alternate history, postmodern alternate history, and uchronie genres?
Alternative history has been regarded as a subgenre of literary fiction, science fiction, or historical fiction, with a series of fiction genres starting from the assumption”What if humanity’s history had evolved differently from previous facts?” Alternative history is mainly intertwined so closely that it cannot be discussed apart from intersecting time, time splitting that it is distinguished in many ways: alternative history, postmodern alternative history and uchronie genres.
Mountfort (2016) distinguishes the three genres with Philip K dick’s The Man in the High Castle, published in 1962 in research. High Castle is one of the most well-known of all alternative histories and is one of the most popular themes in the whole field of history. Also, The Man in the High Castle was inspired by I Ching, an ancient Chinese literary device also known primarily as the text of divination, or the Book of Changes. In the novel, it transcends the philosophical complexities of the story, given that the Nazi win World War II. However, many opinions are divided depending on whether they are viewed from a diachronic or synchronic perspective.
“Amy Ransom argues that critics discussing alternate history (AH) have often neglected to distinguish among the more conventional forms, which are underpinned by a linear, causal, or diachronic view of time, and the more synchronic view implicit in the French term for the genre, uchronie”(Mountfort,2016).
First of all, alternative history usually has the straightest and diachronic view of time. A diachronic perspective can be understood as the concept of time from one point to another, which varies with the changes of the times. Also, unchronie has a synchronic view of time, which can be understood by the concept of a single point in time associated with the same era. In fact, many academic sources study High Castle as a formative example of alternative history, but mostly as a novel of a diachronic genre. However, “Dick’s notion of history is certainly synchronic rather than diachronic, in the terms of Jameson’s analysis, both in his evocation of a web of interrelationships and in his sense that the profusion of possible realities could radically undermine our sense of the real”(Mountfort,2016).
This is linked to the concept of “synchronicity” that Carl Jung and other scholars have tried to explain. “Ransom describes Jung’s synchronicity concept as “related to that associated by Jameson and Alkon with the postmodern”. he defined synchronicity both as an “acausal connecting principle” and as “meaningful coincidence” or “cross-connection”.”(Mountfort,2016). It shows that the work is linked to the Postmodern Alternate History time view. From this, we can see that the three genres of alternative history are distinguished by whether we have a diachronic or a synchronic view, and these are dependent on how we accept stories.
References
Mountfort , P. (2016) The I Ching and Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle SF-TH Inc
Pop Genres 2020 