The Minority Report by Philip K. Dick: Detective and Crime Fiction
I have written the outline and I will upload it with the instruction. Please follow my outline and the professor's instruction.
The assignment is based on the Minority Report written by PHILIP K. DICK which I will upload later with the two secondary sources.
This assignment asks you to select one of the short stories we've read for class and write an essay about how the story follows, reimagines, or subverts conventions of the genre to have an effect on its audience. Your thesis will be guided by an analysis of the key conventions of crime fiction and complemented by secondary sources.
Your argument should do two things:
- Define your assigned text as an example of a specific genre according to one or more key conventions present in this text, and
- Analyze how the text follows, reimagines, or subverts those conventions in order to create a specific effect on its readers.
Because form and content are inextricable, your analysis should focus on the text’s language and stylistic choices, as well as its ideas or narrative. Secondary sources should be used to provide context and background information, and to engage with other people’s arguments about the text or genre. (You can find sources on your own via the library or the internet if you want to, but you can also simply use the course bibliography. If you go looking for your own sources, please run them by me before you cite them so I can help you evaluate their quality.)
Requirements
Rhetorical Situation: Your audience for this essay is the academic discourse community, including your instructor and your peers. Beyond demonstrating your critical reading and academic writing skills to your instructor, your purpose in writing this essay is to contribute meaningfully to the ongoing class discussion of genre, rhetorical situation, and your assigned texts.
Length: 1500-1800 words
Sources: A minimum of two (2) secondary sources, not including the primary text, must be used to develop the essay. Sources may be academic or non-academic, and an annotated works cited page is required as part of the final draft. (Use MLA style if you're familiar with it, but if not, just make sure that you (a) cite your sources clearly when you reference them in your essay and (b) include a complete list of them, with annotations, at the end of your paper.)
Process: Multiple drafts, peer review, and substantive revision are required elements of this assignment. Missing or incomplete drafts and other process work will result in a grade penalty on the final draft, up to and including failure.
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Instructor
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Genre Analysis: The Minority Report
Philip K. Dick’s story, “The Minority Report” focuses on fate (external determinism) and freedom and questions whether free will exists. John Anderton, the main character in the story, supports Precrime, a government agency that uses imaging technology to predict the likelihood of violent crime occurring before it happens. The technology is believed to be capable of identifying the victim and the perpetrator. Dick reimagines the conventions of the detective at the center of crime fiction, and the detective happens to be the potential murderer of a crime that hasn’t be committed. Later the detective has to decide between saving his freedom or the authority. This forces the readers to follow the detective’s perspective and bait them to consider the conflict between individual’s will and the government’s authoritarianism, which insinuates the cold war era.
Dick subverts the idea of traditional crime fiction where there is a focus on thorough investigation detective work to unravel crimes and the perpetrators by setting the futuristic scenes where there is no crime. Crime must be present in a crime fiction, but this is not the case with the story where the government uses predictive tools to determine who is likely to commit crime. In the absence of crime, it is the authoritarian government that makes it possible to achieve this through Precrime. Thus, the author draws attention to a world where crime is prevented based on technology analysis and prediction, which is achieved through authoritarianism. The first chapter introduces readers to a world where Anderton states, “I have quite a few ideas of my own about the way Precrime is run. While the detective story focuses on who committed the crime, the author goes on to highlight that the likely perpetrators can be caught before committing the crime. Typically, traditional crime fiction focuses on the circumstances surrounding the crime and trying to unravel what happened.
In detective fiction, the focus on crime and investigation is often linked to the society where the story is based, and Minority Report is set in an urban scene where there is violence. However, it is the government agencies that use violence to preempt acts of violence. The crime fiction genre often focuses on the criminal act and examining how best to deal with the criminal act to restore peace and the ending connects the events and the whole narrative (Pyrhönen 46). The government controls the society using the pretext of stopping crime to justify using violence, and rather than fight crime, governmental agencies manipulate the people. In the book, the law enforcement officers are crucial to maintaining law and order, and they are entrusted to ensure the Precrime system functions properly to prevent crime in the future and ensure safety and security for all.
In the crime fiction, there are detectives or investigators who try to solve the crime, but then Anderton is the suspect and he cannot investigate himself. In the story, Dick casts Anderton as a potential criminal, and since he is also the Chief of Precrime and this is a surprise to the readers who do not expect him to investigate himself. Anderton was identified as one likely to commit murder in the near future, and the readers are forced to reevaluate Anderton’s role in the story. The readers expect the detective will try to hide his likely involvement in a crime. Both the people and the technology make the future, and the readers go through the plot focusing on the detective trying to unravel the mystery about a future murder. Anderton was forced to run away from those he trained to avoid an inevitable future, but Anderton’s strong belief in Precrime makes him blind to the possibility that the government can be manipulative. Eventually, the readers will find the real conspiracy behind the murder that has not been committed.
The crime fiction traduces suspects early in the story, but it is only later that it becomes clear that Anderton is the suspected and the predetermining system ignores people’s free will. Precognitive mutants or precogs can know about the future, but they are put in chains and are partially conscious, while they fail to know their surroundings. To Anderton, the Precrime system is good to get the violent people first before they commit a crime, and even as they claim they are innocent as he believed the system was tamper proof and accurate. Howevewer, the system values order and control over personal freedom. Witwer, who is Anderton’s assistant, tells him, “With the aid of your precog mutants, you’ve ...