Perceiving Markers Of The Gothic Literature In Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
Perceiving Markers Of The Gothic Literature In Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

Summary/Abstract: This paper proposes a reading of Phillip K. Dick's novel as a late-modern, early postmodern novel, that employs techniques such as displacement, the unheimlich or the use of dichotomies to play with the readers' perception of menace, of the monstrous and of that which was once in a place of favor, while trying to illustrate the principles underlying the phenomena of perception and the transcendence of Gothic literature throughout time into modern and postmodern times, always at odds with some type of literature that it resembles to. This will be achieved by starting from the studies of Katherine N. Hayles and Donna Haraway on the evolution of the idea of the posthuman, as a representative Gothic monster of the postmodern times, and Otto Rank's study on the idea of the double in literature, as well as by taking into account the many chances that the novel offers for analyzing the monster and monstrous on several levels. Because humans are inhabiting colonies, with Earth having been damaged by nuclear war, and there is a radical differentiation to the point of apartheid between genetically damaged people and normal ones, the novel offers great room for interpretation inside the framework of a postmodern Gothic of machines, of the Other and the Self, which is why the dichotomies present in the novel as well as what they convey will be analyzed in this paper while at the same time an attempt will be made at making it clear why perception of Gothic aesthetics can take place.

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