Abstract

This dissertation understands body horror in modern and postmodern horror literature and film as a reflection of and, at times, a reaction against ideological constructions of bodies and the integrity of their boundaries that reflects the larger historical and economic logics at work in Western culture---namely, the ongoing condition of capitalist and disciplinary power in Western modernity and, ultimately, the ways that postmodern constructions of rupture, flow and flexibility constitute the "transformative" conditions of late capitalism and its illusory, ideological apparatuses. The first two chapters position my thesis within and against various critical traditions. In chapter one, I map out the historical and theoretical groundwork upon which much of my thesis is structured. The second chapter consists of a brief survey of some of the most recent scholarship on 20th century horror literature and film, paying particular attention to the ways in which these studies address bodily cohesion and/or rupture as metaphor, as well as the ways in which they understand body horror as a genre. In chapter three, I explore the ways in which the monstrous embodiments that populate H. P. Lovecraft's short fiction demonstrate a cultural tension between rigid models of social and economic organization and emerging cultural and political structures that threaten traditional formulations of industry, race, and class. Chapter four reads the bio-mechanical aliens of the Alien films and Independence Day, as well as the zombies of George Romero's Dead trilogy as swarming bodies that, although offering potentially liberating alternatives to conventional constructions of "human" identity, are also coded as "horrifying" in their failure to conform to late capitalist modes of social and political organization. Lastly, in the fifth chapter, I examine how splatterpunk author and film-maker Clive Barker positions bodies in extremis as sites that not only confound traditional configurations of sex, gender, and class, but also as structures that reveal the potential for new identities and, quite possibly, provide avenues for imagining social resistance