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 40
... going to say before one says it ; there are deities , benign or malign or of uncer- tain status , who can absorb one's consciousness into theirs . All these varieties of ' bad ' empathy jeopardize not only individuality but even ...
... going to say before one says it ; there are deities , benign or malign or of uncer- tain status , who can absorb one's consciousness into theirs . All these varieties of ' bad ' empathy jeopardize not only individuality but even ...
Page 55
... going anywhere . But this implication — that the ultimate determi- nant is the psychic , because anything that we do or make can be allegorized as our fantasy - is not one that is general in Dick's fiction , though it is often relevant ...
... going anywhere . But this implication — that the ultimate determi- nant is the psychic , because anything that we do or make can be allegorized as our fantasy - is not one that is general in Dick's fiction , though it is often relevant ...
Page 170
... going to kill himself . Manfred will seem very different when we are actually taken inside his head . When we first meet him he is institutionalized , but he is well treated . Those who care for him are trying dance and music ; they ...
... going to kill himself . Manfred will seem very different when we are actually taken inside his head . When we first meet him he is institutionalized , but he is well treated . Those who care for him are trying dance and music ; they ...
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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