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
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Page 6
... situation are elegantly assimilated into a theoretical discourse , and the possibility of a lack of fit between society and culture , or individual and historical situation — not to say a bruising collision between them - is discounted ...
... situation are elegantly assimilated into a theoretical discourse , and the possibility of a lack of fit between society and culture , or individual and historical situation — not to say a bruising collision between them - is discounted ...
Page 107
... situation to ( as it were ) catch the situation off guard and make a difference . In the novels the gesture is often one of empathy 33 See Jameson 1987 : 56 , though he is referring to the SF's text's inclusion of images of reading ...
... situation to ( as it were ) catch the situation off guard and make a difference . In the novels the gesture is often one of empathy 33 See Jameson 1987 : 56 , though he is referring to the SF's text's inclusion of images of reading ...
Page 205
... situations that require new decisions , so that earlier problems and purposes are almost forgotten . At the ... situation or topic , around which the novel as an organized narrative will be shaped ; but this tendency is defeated ...
... situations that require new decisions , so that earlier problems and purposes are almost forgotten . At the ... situation or topic , around which the novel as an organized narrative will be shaped ; but this tendency is defeated ...
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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