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 57
... death by finding the magic restorative elixir Ubik . This death within death that repeatedly threatens him and overtakes many of the other characters takes the form of a nightmarish chill and sluggishness , followed by a with- ering to ...
... death by finding the magic restorative elixir Ubik . This death within death that repeatedly threatens him and overtakes many of the other characters takes the form of a nightmarish chill and sluggishness , followed by a with- ering to ...
Page 233
... death of another . Whether Sophia is a god or a machine ( ch . 12 , 178-79 ) is less important than the fact that , whatever she is , she dies . A being can only be a candidate for godhead in Valis if he / she can be hurt , even killed ...
... death of another . Whether Sophia is a god or a machine ( ch . 12 , 178-79 ) is less important than the fact that , whatever she is , she dies . A being can only be a candidate for godhead in Valis if he / she can be hurt , even killed ...
Page 234
... Death of the Reader In the number of Science - Fiction Studies devoted to Philip K. Dick in 1988 , John Huntington ( in his general discussion ) , and Scott Durham and Emmanuel Jouanne ( in their remarks on the late novels ) each ...
... Death of the Reader In the number of Science - Fiction Studies devoted to Philip K. Dick in 1988 , John Huntington ( in his general discussion ) , and Scott Durham and Emmanuel Jouanne ( in their remarks on the late novels ) each ...
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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