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 9
... discussion establishes the shaping force of the postmodern : a 11 This is itself a humanist sentence , implying autonomy and continuity in its subject ; this makes it necessary for me to shuttle back and forth between the texts that ...
... discussion establishes the shaping force of the postmodern : a 11 This is itself a humanist sentence , implying autonomy and continuity in its subject ; this makes it necessary for me to shuttle back and forth between the texts that ...
Page 49
... discussion will take a different course , though one that draws on Jameson's theoretical work . This is the analysis of Dick's political uncon- scious , by way of definition of characteristic image structures , occurring across a range ...
... discussion will take a different course , though one that draws on Jameson's theoretical work . This is the analysis of Dick's political uncon- scious , by way of definition of characteristic image structures , occurring across a range ...
Page 87
... discussion will , however , focus on other stories , the ones that Dick shaped by using a very inven- tive imagination ; partly , at least , with the effect of illuminating the condi- tion of his own society . When all the ...
... discussion will , however , focus on other stories , the ones that Dick shaped by using a very inven- tive imagination ; partly , at least , with the effect of illuminating the condi- tion of his own society . When all the ...
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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