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 23
... scene ( ch . 3 , 35-40 ) , the main character is at the local baths , where he is conducting an illicit affair of a tawdry kind ; he goes to buy his lover an ice cream , only to have the soft drink stand shimmer , fade , and melt away ...
... scene ( ch . 3 , 35-40 ) , the main character is at the local baths , where he is conducting an illicit affair of a tawdry kind ; he goes to buy his lover an ice cream , only to have the soft drink stand shimmer , fade , and melt away ...
Page 211
... scene with the black man happens ' outside ' the novel , by way of coda , because that is where Buckman finds himself when it takes place ; yet it is the scene to which the novel owes its title . I referred above to a scene between ...
... scene with the black man happens ' outside ' the novel , by way of coda , because that is where Buckman finds himself when it takes place ; yet it is the scene to which the novel owes its title . I referred above to a scene between ...
Page 212
... scene in the forecourt of the gas station is quite lacking . This puzzling paratextual ending can be connected to the ending of Dick's next novel , A Scanner Darkly ( 1977 ) . The story , as we have seen , is extremely bleak : the ...
... scene in the forecourt of the gas station is quite lacking . This puzzling paratextual ending can be connected to the ending of Dick's next novel , A Scanner Darkly ( 1977 ) . The story , as we have seen , is extremely bleak : the ...
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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