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 113
... involves the entrance of the concept of ' history ' rather than the history of this or that . ( But if we ask ... involving an extension of the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union , also loses coherence ; the dimensions of the ...
... involves the entrance of the concept of ' history ' rather than the history of this or that . ( But if we ask ... involving an extension of the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union , also loses coherence ; the dimensions of the ...
Page 114
... involves something like ' World War Terminus ' , is so to speak ' shallow ' ; and so , very often , are the other kinds of founding division in the novel , those which do not involve a division between past and present but one among ...
... involves something like ' World War Terminus ' , is so to speak ' shallow ' ; and so , very often , are the other kinds of founding division in the novel , those which do not involve a division between past and present but one among ...
Page 154
... involves rou- tinization and mass production , making actions and things into repetitions and replications ; capitalism involves ' progress ' and planned obsolescence , leading to a vast piling up of waste , causing things , again , to ...
... involves rou- tinization and mass production , making actions and things into repetitions and replications ; capitalism involves ' progress ' and planned obsolescence , leading to a vast piling up of waste , causing things , again , to ...
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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