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Ex-position THCI

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篇名 God and Human Beings in the Technologically-Mediated Living Condition: Philip K. Dick’s Literary Theology in the VALIS Trilogy
卷期 46
作者 Laurie Jui-hua Tseng
頁次 021-043
關鍵字 Philip K. DickThe VALIS TrilogyGnosticismtechnologyGod as Zebraliterary theology
出刊日期 202112
DOI 10.6153/EXP.202112_(46).0002

中文摘要

英文摘要

This article explores Philip K. Dick’s literary theology by studying his VALIS trilogy where men’s technologically-mediated living condition is shown as a simulacrum of God’s divine matrix, powerful but lacking in God’s transcendental holiness. The first section, on God as Zebra, discusses God portrayed in Dick’s work as a vast active living intelligence system (VALIS) containing its simulacrum, men’s information network; hence His alias, Zebra, something made up of a blend of two apparently similar but essentially different systems. The mundane simulation of God inevitably obscures God’s holiness and conceals his presence. However, as the second section on God’s nature will show, despite their apparent similarity, the divine system and its counterpart can still be distinguished by two elements, namely love and God’s/VALIS’s perpetual state of being living, both of which are significantly missing in men’s technological system. The last section extends the thematic inquiry into God’s nature by studying Dick’s concealment of his Gnostic slant in the trilogy vis-a-vis God’s absence from men. Considering the hermeneutic ambiguity in question, which may endlessly put readers’ acts of interpretation on a par with divinity, this article reads Dick’s trilogy more as a literary theology than simply as a Gnostic gospel.

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