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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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Lisa Howard has an MA in Cultural Theory from Trent University, Canada and is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy program at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She has two children and lives near Ottawa, Canada.

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