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 27
... begins to exert a pres- sure on the conventions that the conventions were never designed to withstand . Nor is this simply a matter of the conventions of pulp fiction narrowly considered ; the amalgam of realism and fantasy on which ...
... begins to exert a pres- sure on the conventions that the conventions were never designed to withstand . Nor is this simply a matter of the conventions of pulp fiction narrowly considered ; the amalgam of realism and fantasy on which ...
Page 90
... begins Always Coming Home ( 1988 [ 1985 ] ) by abolishing most of humanity , a frightening way to open space for an ... begin to see how Dick construed abortion as poisoning the springs of creativity , always threatened by the conditions ...
... begins Always Coming Home ( 1988 [ 1985 ] ) by abolishing most of humanity , a frightening way to open space for an ... begin to see how Dick construed abortion as poisoning the springs of creativity , always threatened by the conditions ...
Page 97
... begin from a family , a ' conapt ' , a bed in which the main character has been sleeping and is now awakening ( see ... begins with a dream which seems personal to the dreamer in classic Freudian fashion , because it is about his father ...
... begin from a family , a ' conapt ' , a bed in which the main character has been sleeping and is now awakening ( see ... begins with a dream which seems personal to the dreamer in classic Freudian fashion , because it is about his father ...
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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