Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the PostmodernOnce solely the 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 analyzes 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 challenging. |
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Page 23
There is a scene in Time out of Joint which has caught the eye of several recent
critics , for instance Fredric Jameson and Damien Broderick , 36 and for good
reasons . In this scene ( ch . 3 , 35 – 40 ) , the main character is at the local baths
...
There is a scene in Time out of Joint which has caught the eye of several recent
critics , for instance Fredric Jameson and Damien Broderick , 36 and for good
reasons . In this scene ( ch . 3 , 35 – 40 ) , the main character is at the local baths
...
Page 211
So this moving empathetic 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 ...
So this moving empathetic 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 ...
Page 212
The warmth of emotion of that 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 ...
The warmth of emotion of that 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 ...
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Contents
Philip K Dick and the Postmodern | 23 |
Complications of Humanism and Postmodernism | 35 |
Static and Kinetic in Dicks Political Unconscious | 44 |
Copyright | |
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Bibliographic information
| Title | Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern Liverpool University Press Series Liverpool science fiction texts and studies |
| Author | Christopher Palmer |
| Edition | reprint |
| Publisher | Liverpool University Press, 2003 |
| Original from | the University of Michigan |
| Digitized | 6 Mar 2008 |
| ISBN | 0853236186, 9780853236184 |
| Length | 259 pages |
| Subjects | › Literary Criticism / Science Fiction & Fantasy |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |