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 223
... Valis This chapter looks at Valis ( 1981 ) , the best - known of Dick's late novels , relating this controversial novel to his mature works , both in terms of themes ( the question of Dick's abandonment of politics for theology ) and in ...
... Valis This chapter looks at Valis ( 1981 ) , the best - known of Dick's late novels , relating this controversial novel to his mature works , both in terms of themes ( the question of Dick's abandonment of politics for theology ) and in ...
Page 235
... Valis is different . In Valis , the von Danikenesque notion of intelligent aliens educating stumbling Terrans is inserted into a quotidian Orange County setting . The narrative is concerned with the discovery and understanding of the ...
... Valis is different . In Valis , the von Danikenesque notion of intelligent aliens educating stumbling Terrans is inserted into a quotidian Orange County setting . The narrative is concerned with the discovery and understanding of the ...
Page 236
... VALIS . By this somewhat shocking or embarrassing tactic , the novel defeats our attempt to defend ourselves by saying that it is only a novel . In the contemporary world , the boundaries between art and life , fiction and information ...
... VALIS . By this somewhat shocking or embarrassing tactic , the novel defeats our attempt to defend ourselves by saying that it is only a novel . In the contemporary world , the boundaries between art and life , fiction and information ...
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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