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 134
... instance , as it is dictated by postmodern consumption . In this condition ' the human ' is hard to find or define . In the work of Baudrillard , to take an extreme instance , subjects are seen as objects , brought about by the ...
... instance , as it is dictated by postmodern consumption . In this condition ' the human ' is hard to find or define . In the work of Baudrillard , to take an extreme instance , subjects are seen as objects , brought about by the ...
Page 198
... instance ) or imagery ( reference to machines , for instance ) proliferates . This is not , of course , to say that A Scanner Darkly exhibits a pellucid knowledge of itself . Much of its awareness of Donna for instance is ( as the novel ...
... instance ) or imagery ( reference to machines , for instance ) proliferates . This is not , of course , to say that A Scanner Darkly exhibits a pellucid knowledge of itself . Much of its awareness of Donna for instance is ( as the novel ...
Page 210
... instance , the frivolous gizmo aspect is an acknowledg- ment of the fragility of the empathy that is dramatized . There are , however , a variety of scenes like this in Dick's novels , involv- ing an empathetic or kindly gesture or word ...
... instance , the frivolous gizmo aspect is an acknowledg- ment of the fragility of the empathy that is dramatized . There are , however , a variety of scenes like this in Dick's novels , involv- ing an empathetic or kindly gesture or word ...
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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