Hyperreality and Simulation in the Selected Novels of Philip K. Dick: A Baudrillardian Reading[پايان نامه لاتين]

Hemmat, Yasamin

In today s modern world the distinction between the real and the unreal has become confusing. This confusion is due to the impact of new media information and cybernetic technology; as a result, our personal and social lives have gone under fundamental changes. Our lives have been affected by unreal images and information. Absolute Fake is deceiving us. Philip K. Dick in his novels portrays techno-consumer worlds with strange forms of media and technology that lead to hyperreality, and simulation. Dick s stories typically focus on the fragile nature of reality and the construction of personal identity. The central intention of this research is to analyze the three novels of Philip Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? A Scanner Darkly and Ubik to demonstrate if the characters of these three novels are affected by the hyperreal world in their everyday lives. These three novels demonstrate how consumerism, information, technology and drug culture lead to fragmentation of identity and disappearance of subjectivity. Moreover, these novels represent the technological innovation in consumerist society which results in hyperreality; in such society characters crave to fix their fluid identities through commodities. The philosophical guide for the purpose of looking into Dick s novels and understanding how hyperreal affects characters personalities is Jean Baudrillard s concepts of simulation, simulacra and hyperreality. Simulacra to Baudrillard is more real than real; it is hyperreal. The hyperreal is simulation and simulation is a copy of copy which is removed from the original and even replaced by the original. Baudrillard argues that the hyperreal world offers fake as a reality. It also affects us all in a way that we become increasingly lost in its mesh of simulations. He believes that in techno-consumer culture the models, images, and codes come to control our thoughts and behaviors. Although characters consider technology and media information as a source of achieving the reality, by reading Baudriallrd s theory, this research wants to show that, there is no such a thing as reality and characters just slip into hyperreality which disintegrate their identities.