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The Postmodern Humanism Of Philip K Dick
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Book Synopsis The Postmodern Humanism of Philip K. Dick by : Jason P. Vest
Download or read book The Postmodern Humanism of Philip K. Dick written by Jason P. Vest and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2009-02-17 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From his 1952 short story 'Roog' to the novels The Divine Invasion and VALIS, few authors have had as great of an impact in the latter half of the 20th century as Philip K. Dick. In The Postmodern Humanism of Philip K. Dick, Jason Vest explores the work of this prolific, subversive, and mordantly funny science-fiction writer. He examines how Dick adapted the conventions of science fiction and postmodernism to reflect humanist concerns about the difficulties of maintaining identity, agency, and autonomy in the latter half of the 20th century. In addition to an extensive analysis of the novel Now Wait for Last Year, Vest makes intellectually provocative comparisons between Dick and the works of Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino. He offers a detailed examination of Dick's literary relationship to all three authors, illuminating similarities between Dick and Kafka that have not previously been discussed, as well as similarities between Dick and Borges that scholars frequently note but fail to explore in detail. Like Kafka, Borges, and Calvino, Dick employs fantastic, unreal, and visionary fiction to reflect the disruptions, dislocations, and depressing realities of twentieth-century life. By comparing him to these other writers, Vest demonstrates that Dick's fiction is a fascinating barometer of postmodern American life even as it participates in an international tradition of visionary literature.
Book Synopsis Philip K. Dick by : Christopher Palmer
Download or read book Philip K. Dick written by Christopher Palmer and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once 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
Download or read book Future Imperfect written by Jason P. Vest and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2009-03-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the first eight cinematic adaptations of Dick's fiction in light of their literary sources.
Book Synopsis The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick by : Umberto Rossi
Download or read book The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick written by Umberto Rossi and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philip K. Dick was one of the most popular science fiction novelists of the 20th century, but the contradictory and wily writer has troubled critics who attempt encompassing explanations of his work. This book examines Dick’s writing through the lens of ontological uncertainty, providing a comparative map of his oeuvre, tracing both the interior connections between books and his allusive intertextuality. Topics covered include time travel, alternate worlds, androids and simulacra, finite subjective realities and schizophrenia. Twenty novels are explored in detail, including titles that have received scant critical attention. Some of his most important short stories and two of his realist novels are also examined, providing a general introduction to Dick’s body of work.
Book Synopsis Passages through Enclosures and the Spacetime Continuum in English and American Science Fiction by : Iren Boyarkina
Download or read book Passages through Enclosures and the Spacetime Continuum in English and American Science Fiction written by Iren Boyarkina and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the analysis of various passages across enclosures and the spacetime continuum in science fiction literature. It provides a rich arsenal of analytical instruments for the study of these very popular concepts in the genre of science fiction, and synthesizes current practical and theoretical approaches in science fiction written by active researchers and practitioners in this field. Taking this into consideration, this book will serve as a bedrock to help educators, researchers and students to conduct their research in the field of literature in general and in science fiction in particular. The volume brings together cutting-edge research in the fields of narrative analysis, literary and linguistic analysis, quantum physics, and astrophysics, among others, while the complexity and novelty of the eight essays gathered here offer fresh views on the topic and will stimulate the intellectual curiosity of various readers across different fields of research.
Book Synopsis Teaching Science Fiction by : A. Sawyer
Download or read book Teaching Science Fiction written by A. Sawyer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teaching Science Fiction is the first text in thirty years to explore the pedagogic potential of that most intellectually stimulating and provocative form of popular literature: science fiction. Innovative and academically lively, it offers valuable insights into how SF can be taught historically, culturally and practically at university level.
Book Synopsis Madness in Cold War America by : Alexander Dunst
Download or read book Madness in Cold War America written by Alexander Dunst and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-19 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of how madness came to play a prominent part in America’s political and cultural debates. It argues that metaphors of madness rise to unprecedented popularity amidst the domestic struggles of the early Cold War and become a pre-eminent way of understanding the relationship between politics and culture in the United States. In linking the individual psyche to society, psychopathology contributes to issues central to post-World War II society: a dramatic extension of state power, the fate of the individual in bureaucratic society, the political function of emotions, and the limits to admissible dissent. Such vocabulary may accuse opponents of being crazy. Yet at stake is a fundamental error of judgment, for which madness provides welcome metaphors across US diplomacy and psychiatry, social movements and criticism, literature and film. In the process, major parties and whole historical eras, literary movements and social groups are declared insane. Reacting against violence at home and war abroad, countercultural authors oppose a sane madness to irrational reason—romanticizing the wisdom of the schizophrenic and paranoia’s superior insight. As the Sixties give way to a plurality of lifestyles an alternative vision arrives: of a madness now become so widespread and ordinary that it may, finally, escape pathology.
Book Synopsis Architecture and Science-Fiction Film by : David T. Fortin
Download or read book Architecture and Science-Fiction Film written by David T. Fortin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The home is one of our most enduring human paradoxes and is brought to light tellingly in science-fiction (SF) writing and film. However, while similarities and crossovers between architecture and SF have proliferated throughout the past century, the home is often overshadowed by the spectacle of 'otherness'. The study of the familiar (home) within the alien (SF) creates a unique cultural lens through which to reflect on our current architectural condition. SF has always been linked with alienation; however, the conditions of such alienation, and hence notions of home, have evidently changed. There is often a perceived comprehension of the familiar that atrophies the inquisitive and interpretive processes commonly activated when confronting the unfamiliar. Thus, by utilizing the estranging qualities of SF to look at a concept inherently linked to its perceived opposite - the home - a unique critical analysis with particular relevance for contemporary architecture is made possible.
Book Synopsis Ramsey Campbell by : Keith M. C. O'Sullivan
Download or read book Ramsey Campbell written by Keith M. C. O'Sullivan and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2023-05-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book pays overdue attention to the British writer Ramsey Campbell, a key figure in the post-1970s boom in Anglo-American horror fiction. Despite a huge output and receiving every accolade within his field over a long career, Campbell has not yet been accorded anything like the wider critical recognition given to his contemporary Stephen King. This study concentrates also on Campbell's neglected novels and novellas, rather than the short stories for which he has been better known. The book Ramsey Campbell establishes the author's unique prose style, denoted by a haunted self-consciousness about the act of writing and role of readership, and his distinctive mediation of the Gothic tradition: religiously agnostic, politically liberal and ethically humane. For the first time, Campbell's works are interpreted in the contexts of trends in postmodernist and posthumanist thought and compared explicitly to King's, and his contribution to both Gothic studies and wider contemporary literature is appraised.
Book Synopsis The Philosophy of Science Fiction by : James Edward Burton
Download or read book The Philosophy of Science Fiction written by James Edward Burton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-24 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick explores the deep affinity between two seemingly quite different thinkers, in their attempts to address the need for salvation in (and from) an era of accelerated mechanization, in which humans' capacity for destroying or subjugating the living has attained a planetary scale. The philosopher and the science fiction writer come together to meet the contradictory imperatives of a realist outlook-a task which, arguably, philosophy and science fiction could only ever adequately undertake in collaboration. Their respective approaches meet in a focus on the ambiguous status of fictionalizing, or fabulation, as simultaneously one of mechanization's most devastating tools, and the possibility of its undoing. When they are read together, the complexities and paradoxes thrown up by this ambiguity, with which both Bergson and Dick struggle on their own, open up new ways to navigate ideas of mechanism and mysticism, immanence and transcendence, and the possibility and meaning of salvation. The result is at once an original reading of both thinkers, a new critical theory of the socio–cultural, political and ethical function of fictionalizing, and a case study in the strange affinity, at times the uncanny similarity, between philosophy and science fiction.
Book Synopsis Teaching The Wire by : Tia Sherèe Gaynor
Download or read book Teaching The Wire written by Tia Sherèe Gaynor and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: HBO's critically acclaimed drama The Wire has seen increasing use as course material in college classrooms since the 2008 series finale. This collection of new essays discusses various approaches for using The Wire to bring the experiences of marginalized communities into the post-secondary classroom. The contributors cover a range of topics including leadership, sexuality, class, gender and race.
Book Synopsis Reflecting on Darwin by : Eckart Voigts
Download or read book Reflecting on Darwin written by Eckart Voigts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking up the historical evolution of Darwin and his theories and the cultural responses they have inspired, Reflecting on Darwin poses the following questions: 'How are the apparatuses in the mid-nineteenth century and at the turn of the twenty-first century interconnected with bio-scientific paradigms in art, literature, culture and science?' 'How are naturalism, determinism and Darwinism - the eugenics of the nineteenth century and the genetic coding of the twentieth century - positioned, embodied and staged in various media configurations and media genres?' and 'How have particular media apparatuses formed, displaced or stabilized the various concepts of humankind in the framework of evolutionary theory?' Ranging from the early circulation of Darwin’s ideas to the present, this interdisciplinary collection pays particular attention to Darwin’s postmillennial reception. Beginning with an overview of the historical development of contemporary ecological and ethical fears, Reflecting on Darwin then turns to Darwin’s influence on contemporary media, neo-Victorian literature and culture, science fiction literature and film, and contemporary theory. In examining the plurality of ways in which Darwin has been rewritten and reappropriated, this unique volume both mirrors and inspects the complexity of recent debates in Victorian and neo-Victorian studies.
Book Synopsis Television Finales by : Douglas L. Howard
Download or read book Television Finales written by Douglas L. Howard and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today more than ever, series finales have become cultural touchstones that feed watercooler fodder and Twitter storms among a committed community of viewers. While the final episodes of The Fugitive and M*A*S*H continue to rank among the highest rated broadcasts, more recent shows draw legions of binge-watching fans. Given the importance of finales to viewers and critics alike, Howard and Bianculli along with the other contributors explore these endings and what they mean to the audience, both in terms of their sense of narrative and as episodes that epitomize an entire show. Bringing together a veritable “who’s who” of television scholars, journalists, and media experts, including Robert Thompson, Martha Nochimson, Gary Edgerton, David Hinckley, Kim Akass, and Joanne Morreale, the book offers commentary on some of the most compelling and often controversial final episodes in television history. Each chapter is devoted to a separate finale, providing readers with a comprehensive survey of these watershed moments. Gathering a unique international lineup of journalists and media scholars, the book also offers readers an intriguing variety of critical voices and perspectives.
Book Synopsis Interrogating The Shield by : Nicholas Ray
Download or read book Interrogating The Shield written by Nicholas Ray and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-27 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When The Shield first appeared on US television in March 2002, it broke ratings records with the highest audience-rated original series premiere in cable history. In the course of its subsequent seven-season run, the show went on to win international acclaim for its abrasive depiction of an urban American dystopia and the systemic political and juridical corruption feeding it. The first book dedicated to the analysis of this immensely successful series, Interrogating "The Shield" brings together ten critical essays, written from a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives. Topics range from an exploration of the series’ derivation, genre, and production, to expositions of the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of the show. As may be expected from a multiauthored collection, this volume does not seek to present a homogenized account of The Shield. The show is variously applauded and critiqued. In their critical variety, however, the essays in this book are a testament to the cultural significance and creative complexity of the series. As such, they are a reminder of the renewed power of quality television drama today.
Book Synopsis Circular Narratives in Modern European Literature by : Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez
Download or read book Circular Narratives in Modern European Literature written by Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaking with linearity – the ruling narrative model in the Jewish-Christian tradition since the ancient world – many 20th-century European writers adopted circular narrative forms. Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez shows this trend was not a unified nor conscious movement, but rather a series of works arising sporadically in different countries at different times, using a variety of circular structures to express similar concerns and ideas about the world. This study also shows how the renewed understanding of narrative form leading to this circular trend was anticipated by Nietzsche's critiques of truth, knowledge, language and metaphysics, and especially by his related discussions of nihilism and the eternal recurrence. Starting with an analysis of the theory and genealogy of linear narrative, the author charts the emergence of Nietzsche's idea of eternal return, before then turning to the history of the circular narrative trend. This history is explored from its inception, in the works of August Strindberg, Gertrude Stein and Azorín; through its development in the interwar years, by writers such as Raymond Queneau and Vladimir Nabokov; to its full flowering in the work of authors James Joyce or Samuel Beckett, among others; and its later employment by post-war writers, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Italo Calvino and Maurice Blanchot. Through a series of close readings, the book aims to highlight the various ways in which narrative circularity serves to break with an essentially teleological and theological thinking. Finally, Toribio Vazquez concludes by proposing a new typology of non-linear narratives, which builds on the work of recent narratologists.
Book Synopsis Calvino's Combinational Creativity by : Elizabeth Scheiber
Download or read book Calvino's Combinational Creativity written by Elizabeth Scheiber and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-08 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Calvino’s Combinational Creativity examines the various ways combinatory processes influence the work of the Italian author Italo Calvino. Comprising chapters by six literary scholars, the volume asserts that the Ligurian writer’s creativity often stems from his contemplation of literature even as it investigates the intersection of his work with poets, writers, and literary movements. Each chapter explores a different aspect of Calvino’s creativity. Natalie Berkman examines Calvino as a reader of Ariosto and provides an analysis of mathematical combinations inspired by Vladmir Propp in Il castello dei destini incrociati. Discussing the poetic and scientific influence of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar on Calvino, Sara Ceroni then presents Palomar as a modernist work of epiphanies. This is followed by two chapters investigating different influences on Cosmicomics: Elio Baldi demonstrates how Calvino’s collection of stories appropriates various conventions of the science fiction genre, while Elizabeth Scheiber provides a close reading of two tales to show how Calvino uses science as a metaphor to comment on the poetics of Italian authors Gadda, D’Annunzio, Ungaretti, and Montale. Cecilia Benaglia then proposes Calvino as a reader of Gadda, who served not only as an aesthetic influence, but also as an epistemological one. Finally, juxtaposing Calvino with his contemporary, Umberto Eco, Sebastiano Bazzichetto examines the two authors’ use of figures of speech as ways of constructing labyrinths. Calvino’s Combinational Creativity takes Calvino studies in new directions as it rethinks how the author’s work can be classified, and delves into the sources of his inspiration.
Book Synopsis Rethinking Tradition in English Language and Literary Studies by : Željka Babić
Download or read book Rethinking Tradition in English Language and Literary Studies written by Željka Babić and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume deals with contemporary issues in the field of English studies in order to exchange ideas and experiences across the fields of English language and literary studies, with particular emphasis on cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary issues raised in the fields of culture, linguistics, translation studies and applied linguistics. By juxtaposing traditionalism and contemporaneity as starting points for presentation of research results, the collection critically evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of both and proposes new theoretical and critical paradigms. The specificity of the book lies in its focusing on the practical criticism and the study of particular linguistic, literary, and cultural phenomena. Insightful, thought-provoking and original chapters raise awareness of the existence of a variety of fresh scholarly research practices in the field of the English language and in literary studies on the whole.
