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 99
... offers no hope . In the final paragraph another man who had been overlooked is lured out to identify himself by his horror at the main character's corpse , to which everyone else is again indifferent . Dick's sense of the precariousness ...
... offers no hope . In the final paragraph another man who had been overlooked is lured out to identify himself by his horror at the main character's corpse , to which everyone else is again indifferent . Dick's sense of the precariousness ...
Page 119
... offer is history as contingency , the accretion of dis- crete chances , outcomes , opportunities ( the fate of a ... offers a careful account of the place of the novel's realism in its procedures . 19 How does a novel , which works ...
... offer is history as contingency , the accretion of dis- crete chances , outcomes , opportunities ( the fate of a ... offers a careful account of the place of the novel's realism in its procedures . 19 How does a novel , which works ...
Page 236
... offers his belief to validate the extraordinary ( VALIS ) that is set amid the Orange County quotidian . Jouanne proposes that in the late novels Dick does not merely write about simulacra but makes a sim- ulacrum - a fake ( the whole ...
... offers his belief to validate the extraordinary ( VALIS ) that is set amid the Orange County quotidian . Jouanne proposes that in the late novels Dick does not merely write about simulacra but makes a sim- ulacrum - a fake ( the whole ...
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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