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 155
... Jack begins to crack up . By contrast Chuck Rittersdorf is not schizophrenic , as Jack is ; his stability is threatened from without , not from within , and the novel in which he figures sends him on a real , if bizarre , trip in search ...
... Jack begins to crack up . By contrast Chuck Rittersdorf is not schizophrenic , as Jack is ; his stability is threatened from without , not from within , and the novel in which he figures sends him on a real , if bizarre , trip in search ...
Page 171
... Jack plausibly sees as absurd ; and we have the machines into which people are transformed , first as Jack sees it , in a schizophrenic episode , and then later as Arnie Kott sees it ( his natural healthy selfishness somehow tainted by ...
... Jack plausibly sees as absurd ; and we have the machines into which people are transformed , first as Jack sees it , in a schizophrenic episode , and then later as Arnie Kott sees it ( his natural healthy selfishness somehow tainted by ...
Page 174
... Jack or Arnie who is infected by Manfred's sinister vision ? The narrative will be worked out at the level of individual character , though the twist is that it is the sanity of the individual character that is at stake . The answer ...
... Jack or Arnie who is infected by Manfred's sinister vision ? The narrative will be worked out at the level of individual character , though the twist is that it is the sanity of the individual character that is at stake . The answer ...
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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