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 18
... material . It is as if materiality has been drained out of the natural , concentrated in the artificial , and has then conquered other , formerly immaterial realms . By way of parody of the technologism of much fifties ( and later ) SF ...
... material . It is as if materiality has been drained out of the natural , concentrated in the artificial , and has then conquered other , formerly immaterial realms . By way of parody of the technologism of much fifties ( and later ) SF ...
Page 136
... material : consumption of fast food is on the way to this , since the stuff is processed rather than cooked , and eaten quickly , leaving behind bits of greasy plastic that disap- pear into a bin , and a confused feeling that you must ...
... material : consumption of fast food is on the way to this , since the stuff is processed rather than cooked , and eaten quickly , leaving behind bits of greasy plastic that disap- pear into a bin , and a confused feeling that you must ...
Page 216
... material in the text that plays with the fact that it is a text ) ; the fantastic ( messages from extraterrestrial beings : VALIS ) ; and , in this special case , the insane ( material in the text which make us wonder whether the author ...
... material in the text that plays with the fact that it is a text ) ; the fantastic ( messages from extraterrestrial beings : VALIS ) ; and , in this special case , the insane ( material in the text which make us wonder whether the author ...
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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