tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8692381608294018617.post2299119074194752732..comments2023-11-05T07:27:43.837-05:00Comments on Narrative and Technology: Revision 1: Androids as a MetaphorAdamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16302919444091859459noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8692381608294018617.post-23901573954942120912013-10-04T19:58:55.977-04:002013-10-04T19:58:55.977-04:00There's something awkward about the transition...There's something awkward about the transition from the first part of the first paragraph and the thesis statement itself. This could have been improved.<br /><br />The second paragraph is long and clunky. Your discussion of McCarthyism is perfectly reasonable (the prose is occasionally awkward, but at least efficient). Your claim that the novel is about McCarthyism, though, at least initially seems overwrought.<br /><br />I say that not because it's absurd or uninteresting. I simply say it because McCarthy was long since gone when DADES was published. The novel is self-evidently concerned with paranoia, and McCarthyism is one form (arguably even the most important form) paranoid had taken in the U.S. during Philip K. Dick's lifetime. And yet, you're making a leap by claiming that the novel is focused upon it. Why McCarthyism rather than Vietnam and the internal conflicts surrounding it, for instance? <br /><br />You have some bad moments, where you simply make huge leaps: "Bounty hunters can be viewed as American spies trying to find and kill Soviet spies. Both androids and bounty hunters seem to have specialized weaponry..." This is implying that spies=James Bond, without bothering to work through the details. However, you have some good moments too. The discussion of brain-washing, although brief, is *exactly* the kind of thing that can pin down this novel as being about cold-war paranoia and spying (and yet, where is McCarthy?).<br /><br />The paragraph about Buster Friendly & Mercerism is painfully long. It would have benefited greatly from being split up and edited - a paragraph about BF, a paragraph about M, a paragraph to bring them together, for instance. This long discussion has its own good and bad moments. You still really struggle in an attempt to show that BF - running a commercial radio program with advertisements, full of Hollywood Starlets - should be understood as representing communism. Even if we agree that he's intolerant, so is Mercer (he endorses killing all the androids!)<br /><br />You handle the communist persecution of religion well (I think it's a point in your favor, certainly), but ignore the elephant in the room (the so-common-it-gets-cliched claim that communism really operates as a state religion - see the cult of Lenin or of Mao!). There's also a second peculiar elephant in the room - you do a good job exploring the relationship between faith and commerce in Mercerism. Good! But it's extremely odd, after doing this work, that you basically see the novel as an indictment of communism immediately after you explored the corrupt commerce at the heart of its religion! That, at least, demanded more work.<br /><br />The paragraph about the unknown doesn't really do anything - you'd have been better off finishing a different thread of thought.<br /><br />Overall: Your research is solid, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that you do have interesting, well-thought out insights into the text (Mercerism & commerce is good; the brainwashing is short but good). But you wander too much - the whole long discussion of McCarthy, for instance, dragged you down. You would have been better off moving to the Mercerism-as-capital and BF-as-communism thing and really trying harder to prove it in detail. It's a tough but interesting argument - you need(ed) to focus more relentlessly on it to really make it work.Adamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16302919444091859459noreply@blogger.com