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 11
... reader exists in a state of complacency so dense that it cannot be upset and undermined sufficiently often . Thence the formally subversive text is privileged . It is not criticism of this or that aspect of reality that is required ...
... reader exists in a state of complacency so dense that it cannot be upset and undermined sufficiently often . Thence the formally subversive text is privileged . It is not criticism of this or that aspect of reality that is required ...
Page 25
... reader's experience . ( The breakthrough novel here is The Man in the High Castle , which chal- lenges its readers by setting loose within the text two other texts — the I Ching and The Grasshopper Lies Heavy - whose authority ...
... reader's experience . ( The breakthrough novel here is The Man in the High Castle , which chal- lenges its readers by setting loose within the text two other texts — the I Ching and The Grasshopper Lies Heavy - whose authority ...
Page 234
... Reader In the number of Science - Fiction Studies devoted to Philip K. Dick in 1988 , John Huntington ( in his ... reader circle each other in antagonistic interdependence . ' The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of ...
... Reader In the number of Science - Fiction Studies devoted to Philip K. Dick in 1988 , John Huntington ( in his ... reader circle each other in antagonistic interdependence . ' The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of ...
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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