Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the PostmodernOnce the sole possession of fans and buffs, the SF author Philip K Dick is now finding a much wider audience, as the success of the films Blade Runner and Minority Report shows. The kind of world he predicted in his funny and frightening novels and stories is coming closer to most of us: shifting realities, unstable relations, uncertain moralities. Philip K Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern examines a wide range of Dick's work, including his short stories and posthumously published realist novels. Christopher Palmer analyses the puzzling and dazzling effects of Dick's fiction, and argues that at its heart is a clash between exhilarating possibilities of transformation, and a frightening lack of ethical certainties. Dick's work is seen as the inscription of his own historical predicament, the clash between humanism and postmodernism being played out in the complex forms of the fiction. The problem is never resolved, but Dick's ways of imagining it become steadily more ingenious and chal |
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Page 10
... Dick's political unconscious ; but first the historical interest of a more conscious and explicit side of his writing is defined . The rest of this chapter surveys what happens to subjects in Dick's novels , and then what happens to ...
... Dick's political unconscious ; but first the historical interest of a more conscious and explicit side of his writing is defined . The rest of this chapter surveys what happens to subjects in Dick's novels , and then what happens to ...
Page 42
... Dick's novels one looks at postmodernity through the eyes of realism can only be pro- visional ; but it is the best way of describing an effect of shock that is basic to his work . Dick's fiction really is a context in which the ...
... Dick's novels one looks at postmodernity through the eyes of realism can only be pro- visional ; but it is the best way of describing an effect of shock that is basic to his work . Dick's fiction really is a context in which the ...
Page 44
... Dick's work is the ' megatext ' that is American SF , and this is where our discussion begins . The relation to this megatext of Dick's oeuvre is a skewed one , and the coherence of Dick's own oeuvre is sometimes hard to discern ...
... Dick's work is the ' megatext ' that is American SF , and this is where our discussion begins . The relation to this megatext of Dick's oeuvre is a skewed one , and the coherence of Dick's own oeuvre is sometimes hard to discern ...
Contents
Philip K Dick and the Postmodern | 3 |
Complications of Humanism and Postmodernism | 30 |
Static and Kinetic in Dicks Political Unconscious | 44 |
Copyright | |
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Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern Christopher Palmer No preview available - 2003 |
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