PROGRAM | English

By: Gunner Taylor Chair: Sarah Wasserman

ABSTRACT

We live in weird times. Climate disaster, plague, and economic stagnation define our present moment and demand immediate action. But it seems that Americans can’t agree on the definitions of the terms of the debate, let alone on how to tackle any of the substantive issues that face our communities, country, and planet. Weird History: Genre Mixing in Contemporary American Literature intervenes in this moment of crisis by interrogating how received narratives of American History are made “weird” in contemporary American historical fiction by mixing it with the tropes of popular genre fiction. This project looks to the economic, political, and cultural contexts of American historical fiction written after 1989 to argue that Weird History is a new genre of fiction that presents readers with fictions that simultaneously lay claim to producing historical knowledge and are explicitly non-realist. In this seeming contradiction, they are able to defamiliarize the past and encourage readers to question what they think they know about American history.

This project engages with pressing scholarly debates on historiography, the genre turn in contemporary American fiction, and the supposed death of postmodernism. It argues that by mixing historical fiction and popular genre fiction, works of Weird History are able to reinvigorate the experimental impulses of the postmodern fiction of the second half of the 20^thcentury while bringing experimental historical fiction to broader audiences. While they aim at producing a popular progressive historical pedagogy, they must compete with the demands of an increasingly consolidated culture industry dominated by brand name Intellectual Property.

The four chapters of this project look at how four popular genres, ghost stories, pulp fiction, alternate history, and science fiction, are mixed with historical fiction to interrogate ideas of American exceptionalism, racial progressivism, and the great man theory of history. Each of these genres provide contemporary authors with new lenses for understanding issues of gender, racial identity, and class in American culture. But this project also argues that genre fiction has always been concerned with these issues and contained an ever-evolving commentary on the genres it works within; in this way genre fiction has always been historical fiction.

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