Publicación: Alternate history and the normalization of the traumatic past in Philip K. Dick’s "The Man in the High Castle", Len Deighton’s SS-GB and their television adaptations
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2021-03-17
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Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0 Internacional
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Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (España). Facultad de Filología
Resumen
In spite of being a literary genre that has its basis on questioning the consequences of modifying the outcome of a given historical event — an activity that has traditionally been performed since antiquity —, alternate history was not properly defined as such until the mid-1990s, having finally achieved a mainstream status as of the second decade of the 21st century thanks to the popularization of various television adaptations that have alternate history narratives as their source. These novels and their adaptations make display of an ability to portray the way in which the historical events they alter are shaped within the human mind as well as how they are perceived in collective memory. Consequently, the purpose behind this master’s dissertation is to analyse the aforementioned ability in two alternate history novels that have received their own television adaptation in recent years, namely Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Len Deighton’s SS-GB (1978), as well as to study the evolution of the public perception of the historical event that both share as the focus of their divergence in their original narratives and their modern television counterparts: a Nazi victory in World War II. After introducing the essential theoretical framework behind the literary genre, this dissertation will proceed to analyse Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, focusing on the features that identify it as an alternate history like the rupture of linear time and the reflection upon themes such as necessity, determinism and human agency, to then continue towards its connections with real-world history and the study of the normalization of the traumatic past while placing special attention on how its recent television adaptation has impacted on such process. Immediately afterwards, the same procedure will be applied to Deighton’s SS-GB and its corresponding television series. Finally, the conclusions of this dissertation will highlight the process of normalization as an ongoing matter of discussion that is definitely enriched by new audiovisual adaptations, as well as alternate history’s resourceful nature, that will likely guarantee its continuity as a genre regardless of the medium in which it is produced.
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alternate history, Nazi victory in World War II, The Man in the High Castle, SS-GB, television adaptations, normalization
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Facultad de Filología
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