Promotional Information

Contains eleven essays and a bibliography, re-examining Dick's entire oeuvre as prefiguring by decades the philosophical skepticism of postmodernism, and constituting a coherent cultural critique of post-World War II America.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Samuel J. Umland Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick by Carl Freedman Dianoia/Paranoia: Dick's Double "Impostor" by Neil Easterbrook Worlds of Chance and Counterfeit: Dick, Lem, and the Preestablished Cacophony by Karl Wessel Philip K. Dick and the Nuclear Family by Christopher Palmer "To Flee from Dionysus": Enthousiasmos from "Upon the Dull Earth" to VALIS by Samuel J. Umland The Swiss Connection: Psychological Systems in the Novels of Philip K. Dick by Anthony Wolk Unrequited Love in We Can Build You by Rebecca A. Umland "What is this sickness?": "Schizophrenia" and We Can Build You by Gregg Rickman "Man Everywhere in Chains": Dick, Rousseau, and The Penultimate Truth by Merritt Abrash Two Cases of Conscience: Loyalty and Race in The Crack in Space and Counter-Clock World by Jake Jakaitis Chinese Finger-traps, or "A Perturbation in the Reality Field": Paradox as Conversion in Philip K. Dick's Fictions by Michael Feehan Bibliography Index

About the Author

SAMUEL J. UMLAND is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He was educated at schools in Kansas and Nebraska, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He is the author of numerous articles on film, film theory, and the teaching of literature, and has written four unproduced screenplays.