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 89
... story is , for better or worse , offen- sive , whereas ' Human Is ' is unlikely to annoy anyone , it is worth discuss- ing its morality and its fantasy , though this entails briefly digressing from our nominated period ( the early ...
... story is , for better or worse , offen- sive , whereas ' Human Is ' is unlikely to annoy anyone , it is worth discuss- ing its morality and its fantasy , though this entails briefly digressing from our nominated period ( the early ...
Page 99
... story's pessimism that it has a circular form , and the individual through whom we saw everything is eliminated at the end , becoming another hanging stranger . The main character was merely part of the aliens ' operating procedure ...
... story's pessimism that it has a circular form , and the individual through whom we saw everything is eliminated at the end , becoming another hanging stranger . The main character was merely part of the aliens ' operating procedure ...
Page 106
... story is not yet fantasy , because the assumptions that shape his alterations are those of society in general , but the story meta- morphoses into fantasy when the new model becomes the ' actual ' town , which then entraps the story's ...
... story is not yet fantasy , because the assumptions that shape his alterations are those of society in general , but the story meta- morphoses into fantasy when the new model becomes the ' actual ' town , which then entraps the story's ...
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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