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Space Opera: The Aesthetics Of Personhood In The Works And Worlds Of Philip K. Dick, Gabriel Francis Mamola

English Dissertations

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 …