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 55
... fact that it is Earth , as they discover , and that they have found themselves on Earth itself without knowledge of their purpose in life has a clear allegorical point . But at the very end of the novel matters are explained ( or almost ...
... fact that it is Earth , as they discover , and that they have found themselves on Earth itself without knowledge of their purpose in life has a clear allegorical point . But at the very end of the novel matters are explained ( or almost ...
Page 230
... fact Valis does not daringly play with textuality in a world of irreducible non - textuality . It retreats into ... fact . If ' healing powers are the absolute certain sign of the presence of the divine ' , ' Then St. Joseph Hospital is ...
... fact Valis does not daringly play with textuality in a world of irreducible non - textuality . It retreats into ... fact . If ' healing powers are the absolute certain sign of the presence of the divine ' , ' Then St. Joseph Hospital is ...
Page 233
... 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 . The sado - masochism that else- where vitiated humans ' will to help or be helped now reappears at 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 . The sado - masochism that else- where vitiated humans ' will to help or be helped now reappears at 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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