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Philip K. Dick’s Suburban Jeremiad
Proietti, Salvatore
2015
Abstract
Better known as a science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick was, during the fifties, also the author of numerous mimetic novels, mostly published posthumously, set in the years of the rise of suburban communities in the American West. The aim of this essay is to show how these novels address and foreground one of the main concerns in Dick’s fiction: the theme of community-building. Present in a number of his science fiction novels, which often connect the suburban ideal with images of the Cold War, here this theme becomes the central focus. At least until the mid-sixties, in Dick’s highly polyphonic fictional worlds, the early fifties leave their mark as the memory of a time of troubled healing after the trauma of World War Two, and the suburb is a site of necessary reconstruction after an experience of societal and psychological breakdown.
Publisher
EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste
Source
Salvatore Proietti "Philip K. Dick’s Suburban Jeremiad" in: Leonardo Buonomo and Elisabetta Vezzosi (edited by) "Discourses of Emancipation and the Boundaries of Freedom. Selected Papers from the 22nd AISNA Biennial International Conference", EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2015, pp.283-291
Languages
en
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