Space Opera: The Aesthetics of Personhood in the Works and Worlds of Philip K. Dick

Author

Gabriel Francis Mamola

Graduation Semester and Year

2020

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Timothy Richardson

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine the major novels of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick in light of his non-fictional and speculatively mystical writings. After establishing an approach to science fiction in general and Dick in particular, grounded in the Aristotelian mimetic theory of Stephen Halliwell and the ambient rhetorical theory of Thomas Rickert, I argue that Dick came more and more, as his career progressed and his body of work developed, to understand his oeuvre as a unified art-work—unified not only by its themes but by the fictional world it portrayed. More to the point, I argue that Dick’s non-fictional, speculative writings collectively known as the Exegesis make up an integral part of this overarching mimesis. I go on to attempt a description of the causal structures that unify Dick’s mimetic world. In doing so, I identify a concern with the ontological and ethical status of relationship in worlds undergoing such scientifictional collapse as have made Dick an exemplar of postmodern fiction. I demonstrate that in the worlds that Dick portrays, subjective collapse is often the precursor to and occasion of a reorientation of his characters’ sense of identity toward their relationships with other persons—particularly the foundational personhood of God. In construing Dick as a mystical writer, albeit one writing within and against a postmodern milieu, I try to show how his insights into the nature of technology and its potential integration into human being are valuable to the contemporary theorist trying to come to terms with our incipient posthumanism, despite Dick’s relative lack of focus on specific technologies or technological trends.

Keywords

Philip K. Dick, Person, Posthumanism, Mimesis, Rhetoric, Aesthetics, Ethics, Artificial intelligence, Technology, Media, God, Science fiction

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

Recommended Citation

Mamola, Gabriel Francis, "Space Opera: The Aesthetics of Personhood in the Works and Worlds of Philip K. Dick" (2020). English Dissertations. 105.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/english_dissertations/105