Interrogating reality: Philip K. Dick, science fiction, and (post)modernism.

摘要

This dissertation contends that the fiction of Philip K. Dick not only reflects the complex and difficult-to-define relationship between literary modernism and postmodernism, but also enacts a transition between the two. By comparing some of Dick's significant short stories and novels to the work of Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino, I seek to demonstrate how Dick's writing both adopts and adapts the conventions of American science fiction to examine the intricacies of human identity and agency in the latter half of the twentieth century. This era witnessed numerous social, political, economic, technological, and cultural innovations that challenged American and European conceptions of freedom, progress, and identity. Dick's fiction, I argue, is a fascinating barometer of modern and postmodern American life from the early fifties to the early eighties.;The first chapter examines how Dick and Kafka use two specific subgenres of fantastic fiction, the animal allegory and the bureaucratic bestiary, to demonstrate the precarious nature of human identity within the heavily bureaucratized political state that has come to characterize the twentieth century.;The second chapter compares Dick's and Borges's use of the alternate-world (or parallel-reality) story to meditate upon the influences and effects of political repression on human agency and consciousness.;The third chapter explores how Dick and Calvino deal with divine, spiritual, and scriptural subject matter in their metaphysical fiction, particularly as these themes relate to the creation and production of textual meaning.;The fourth and final chapter discusses how Dick's 1966 novel Now Wait for Last Year unites many of his major themes---including extraterrestrial invasion, time travel, and drug abuse---along with a remarkable portrait of a marriage in crisis, to examine the contentious gender relationships and antiwar activities of Vietnam-era America.;I analyze Dick's fiction through the lens of (post)modernism, a term that imbricates the ambivalent relationship between literary modernism and postmodernism, to illustrate how complicated and ambiguous a writer Philip K. Dick is. His fiction is emblematic of the tensions, anxieties, and possibilities that characterize American fiction from the 1950s through the 1980s.