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 45
The ideological implications of this megatext need to be explored , but it is also
true that in utilizing it the genre shares in the novel ' s affinities to gossip , that
marvellous organ of communal consent and dissent : what I can report others as
...
The ideological implications of this megatext need to be explored , but it is also
true that in utilizing it the genre shares in the novel ' s affinities to gossip , that
marvellous organ of communal consent and dissent : what I can report others as
...
Page 93
... elves , speaking taxis , intelligent dogs , grimly astute spiders , a male animate
shoe seeking out , animating and reproducing with a female shoe , a set of small
creatures who incarnate Bach ' s Goldberg Variations , and so on . 14 It is true ...
... elves , speaking taxis , intelligent dogs , grimly astute spiders , a male animate
shoe seeking out , animating and reproducing with a female shoe , a set of small
creatures who incarnate Bach ' s Goldberg Variations , and so on . 14 It is true ...
Page 127
27 Nonetheless it is true — again in a simple , mundane way — that the I Ching
changes each moment in which it is consulted . The moment becomes different
for the consulter , because he or she has to calm down and meditate on whatever
...
27 Nonetheless it is true — again in a simple , mundane way — that the I Ching
changes each moment in which it is consulted . The moment becomes different
for the consulter , because he or she has to calm down and meditate on whatever
...
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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 | |
9 other sections not shown
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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 |