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 100
... child.23 So it is in ' The Father - Thing ' ( 1954 , CS3 ) , an aliens - are - amongst - us horror story whose setting is domestic . A young boy , Charlie , discovers that he has two fathers , the ordinary decent human one and a ...
... child.23 So it is in ' The Father - Thing ' ( 1954 , CS3 ) , an aliens - are - amongst - us horror story whose setting is domestic . A young boy , Charlie , discovers that he has two fathers , the ordinary decent human one and a ...
Page 105
... child rather than the father or husband ( as in ' Sales Pitch ' and ' Nanny ' ) ; here the child is wholly a victim . The story expresses the harm done to the child by society's double insistence that there is some fearful threat and ...
... child rather than the father or husband ( as in ' Sales Pitch ' and ' Nanny ' ) ; here the child is wholly a victim . The story expresses the harm done to the child by society's double insistence that there is some fearful threat and ...
Page 163
... children are not different from adults , since we are all neurotic together , or a given individual , child or adult , is suffering from an identifi- able disease and so is distinct from others . The two approaches , one emphasizing ...
... children are not different from adults , since we are all neurotic together , or a given individual , child or adult , is suffering from an identifi- able disease and so is distinct from others . The two approaches , one emphasizing ...
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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