Counterfactual Thinking - Counterfactual Writing

Dorothee Birke, Michael Butter, Tilmann Köppe, Dorothee Birke, Michael Butter, Tilmann Köppe

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9783110268584
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110268669
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Literature

Counterfactuality is currently a hotly debated topic. While for some disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive science, or psychology counterfactual scenarios have been an important object of study for quite a while, counterfactual thinking has in recent years emerged as a method of study for other disciplines, most notably the social sciences. This volume provides an overview of the current definitions and uses of the concept of counterfactuality in philosophy, historiography, political sciences, psychology, linguistics, physics, and literary studies. The individual contributions not only engage the controversies that the deployment of counterfactual thinking as a method still generates, they also highlight the concept's potential to promote interdisciplinary exchange without neglecting the limitations and pitfalls of such a project. Moreover, the essays from literary studies, which make up about half of the volume, provide both a historical and a systematic perspective on the manifold ways in which counterfactual scenarios can be incorporated into and deployed in literary texts.

Table of contents

• Introduction: England Win
• First Steps Toward an Explication of Counterfactual Imagination
• Thought Experiments and Literature
• Counterfactual Explanation in Literature and the Social Sciences
• Counterfactual Thinking in Physics
• Counterfactuals in the Social Context: The Case of Political Interviews and Their Effects
• A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective on Counterfactuality
• Significance and Abstraction: Scientific Uses of Counterfactual Thought Experiments in the Early 20th Century
• What-If? Counterfactuality and History
• Counterfactuals, Contingency, and Causation
• Plot vs. Story: Towards a Typology of Counterfactual Historical Novels
• “If I Were a Man”: Functions of the Counterfactual in Feminist Fiction
• Temporal Tourism: Time Travel and Counterfactuality in Literature and Film
• “What Might Have Been Is Not What Is”: Dickens’s Narrative Refusals
• How To Do Things With Worlds: From Counterfactuality to Counterfictionality
• List of Contributors