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 39
... later novels he proliferates theodicies with apparent seri- ousness , but then dismantles them . He wonders whether the Incarnation , the central mystery of Christianity , was in fact a failure in its redemptive purpose , as the ...
... later novels he proliferates theodicies with apparent seri- ousness , but then dismantles them . He wonders whether the Incarnation , the central mystery of Christianity , was in fact a failure in its redemptive purpose , as the ...
Page 51
... later fiction it is interesting that the source of this speech is a simulacrum , not the prophet and explorer Preston as his audience ( devout Prestonites ) had thought , but a ' withered image ' , endlessly repeating his encomium to ...
... later fiction it is interesting that the source of this speech is a simulacrum , not the prophet and explorer Preston as his audience ( devout Prestonites ) had thought , but a ' withered image ' , endlessly repeating his encomium to ...
Page 91
... later novels ) weapons that have a ' tropism ' for human brain waves , or robot taxis that have a tropism for a customer , while the surviving humans have to make do with ersatz coffee , revolting synthetic pap for food , tacky clothes ...
... later novels ) weapons that have a ' tropism ' for human brain waves , or robot taxis that have a tropism for a customer , while the surviving humans have to make do with ersatz coffee , revolting synthetic pap for food , tacky clothes ...
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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