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 141
... seems more depressed than ever , Glimmung abruptly raises himself from where he lies wallowing in his own blood and the icy water of the lake ( he is here comparable to the dying Christ , giving forth blood and water ) , rears up ...
... seems more depressed than ever , Glimmung abruptly raises himself from where he lies wallowing in his own blood and the icy water of the lake ( he is here comparable to the dying Christ , giving forth blood and water ) , rears up ...
Page 170
... seem very different when we are actually taken inside his head . When we first meet him he is institutionalized , but ... seems to pause . Manfred is autistic , yet he has a special grace to him ; music might help him , so might science ...
... seem very different when we are actually taken inside his head . When we first meet him he is institutionalized , but ... seems to pause . Manfred is autistic , yet he has a special grace to him ; music might help him , so might science ...
Page 218
... seems improvised . The discus- sion of gestures of empathy has attempted to define this improvised effect as a result of the resistance of Dick's humanist ideals to his insights about postmodernity . Empathy has to blossom like an ...
... seems improvised . The discus- sion of gestures of empathy has attempted to define this improvised effect as a result of the resistance of Dick's humanist ideals to his insights about postmodernity . Empathy has to blossom like an ...
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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