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 58
... imagination of an existence wholly abstract ( Ubik is the spirit of the Commodity , rather than a material thing ) yet capable of the most vivid fearing and desiring , of being in the body and yet unable to live the body's life , has ...
... imagination of an existence wholly abstract ( Ubik is the spirit of the Commodity , rather than a material thing ) yet capable of the most vivid fearing and desiring , of being in the body and yet unable to live the body's life , has ...
Page 86
... imagining , as an activity which is literalized and examined in many of the stories.4 Dick desires to ground value in the imag- ination , but is alive to the way in which imagination may serve the power- ful and destructive . The ...
... imagining , as an activity which is literalized and examined in many of the stories.4 Dick desires to ground value in the imag- ination , but is alive to the way in which imagination may serve the power- ful and destructive . The ...
Page 91
... imagination is repeatedly the threat to that value , for it is the imagination of the evil or sterile that produces the world that cries out for remaking.12 It is remarkable how often sterility is a threat or a condition in Dick's ...
... imagination is repeatedly the threat to that value , for it is the imagination of the evil or sterile that produces the world that cries out for remaking.12 It is remarkable how often sterility is a threat or a condition in Dick's ...
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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