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Viewing report
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Hidden in Perfect Day. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, July 2008, Pages: 156
Leave it to Philip K. Dick to turn everything upside down. Dick takes aim at certain schizophrenic social trends in America, such as, an inability to desymbolize, a tendency to literalize metaphor, confusions of real and fake, as well as other symptoms such as flattened affect and a lack of theory of mind. Dick sees these traits as the potential building blocks of fascism. From a particular postmodern or post-structuralist perspective, this is a surprise. Dick's paranoid characters are, by contrast, likable, capable and rendered with affection. The paranoids in Dick's S.F., it seems, are emblematic of internality, and of indeterminate and emotive subjectivity. Consequently, Dick's view of paranoids seems to fall outside those current prominent literary and cultural trends (e.g., certain postmodernisms and poststructuralisms) that express both a negative view of paranoia (as proto-fascist) and an ambivalence about subjectivity. This book explores the topsy-turvy world of Dick's fiction from the perspective of Cultural Theory.
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