Kucukalic looks beyond the received criticism and stereotypes attached to Philip K. Dick and his work and shows, using a wealth of primary documents including previously unpublished letters and interviews, that Philip K. Dick is a serious and relevant philosophical and cultural thinker whose writing offer us important insights into contemporary digital culture. Evaluating five novels that span Dick's career--from Martian Time Slip (1964) to Valis (1981)--Kucukalic explores the the intersections of identity, narrative, and technology in order to ask two central, but uncharted "Dickian" questions: What is reality? and What is human?
Chapter 1: Introduction: Philip K. Dick, Canonical Writer of the Digital Age Chapter 2: Biography of a Writer Chapter 3: Martian Time Slip: "The Mindset of Otherness" Chapter 4: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: "Mechanical Universe and Its Discontents" Chapter 5: A Maze of Death: "Life Is A Dream, But Is It Better That Way?" Chapter 6: A Scanner Darkly: "The Reel Identity" Chapter 7: The Search for Truth as an Antidote for Suffering in Valis
Biography
Lejla Kucukalic received her Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Delaware. She is currently translating the Bosnian-Herzegovinian novel, It Happened in July, about the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica. Professor Kucukalic is teaching in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York.
