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 |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 46
Page 9
... politics and psychol- ogy of modernity , is radical and spectacular . The other is that Dick's humanism is itself an ... political unconscious ' is defined here , the recurrent images and forms that speak an imaginative resolution — or ...
... politics and psychol- ogy of modernity , is radical and spectacular . The other is that Dick's humanism is itself an ... political unconscious ' is defined here , the recurrent images and forms that speak an imaginative resolution — or ...
Page 44
... Political Unconscious This chapter analyses a structure of imagery in Dick's work that is con- nected with movement and stasis . Building on the observations about dis- integration and blockage as a condition of Dick's worlds that were ...
... Political Unconscious This chapter analyses a structure of imagery in Dick's work that is con- nected with movement and stasis . Building on the observations about dis- integration and blockage as a condition of Dick's worlds that were ...
Page 86
... political point is clear , yet , like the later novels , they very often dissolve the texture of reality , hollowing out night- mare worlds into which the ' real ' world may be sucked in a few moments , jeopardizing the epistemological ...
... political point is clear , yet , like the later novels , they very often dissolve the texture of reality , hollowing out night- mare worlds into which the ' real ' world may be sucked in a few moments , jeopardizing the epistemological ...
Contents
Philip K Dick and the Postmodern | 3 |
Complications of Humanism and Postmodernism | 30 |
Static and Kinetic in Dicks Political Unconscious | 44 |
Copyright | |
11 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern Christopher Palmer No preview available - 2003 |
Common terms and phrases
alien Alphane Moon androids Arnie Arnie's Autofac become Bleekmen Chapter Charley child Childan Chuck Clans condition consumption contemporary context culture death deity depiction Deus Irae Dick Dick's fiction Dick's novels Dick's SF Dickian discussion Divine Invasion dopers drug effect empathy entropy episode ethical fact fake fantasy feeling fifties Flow My Tears Galactic Pot-Healer genre Grasshopper Lies Heavy happens High Castle Horselover Fat human humanist images imagination individual instance Jack Japanese Kasoura kind late novels Lord Running Clam machines main character Manfred Manfred's Martian Time-Slip Maze of Death means megatext modern narrative Nazis ordinary Palmer Eldritch Penultimate Truth person Philip Philip K plot political postmodern postmodernist Radio Free Albemuth reader realism reality relations robot Runciter Scanner Darkly scene Science Fiction seen sense short stories Simulacra social society space suggests Tagomi things Timothy Archer tion Ubik Valis Walt