The Unnameable Monster in Literature and Film

This book visits the ‘Thing’ in its various manifestations as an unnameable monster in literature and film, reinforcing the idea that the very essence of the monster is its excess and its unrepresentable nature. Tied primarily to the artistic modes of the fantastic, science-fiction, gothic, and horror, the monstrous and unknowable ‘Thing’ exists as a reminder of the sublime object that exceeds our worst fears and propels our most basic desires with significant social, cultural, and conceptual implications. Beville examines the cultural and symbolic value of ‘the Thing,’ responding to the fact that in much criticism, the monsters of literature and culture are managed in processes of classification and in claims that they serve a social function by embodying all that is horrible in the human imagination, thus purging and projecting our fears of otherness. In contrast, this study looks at the ‘Thing’ directly, as itself, in its various formulations, observing that there remains a difficult category of monster that defies all attempts to constrain it in naming, and as such our utilitarian attempts to reduce it to some sense of functionality. Beville primarily considers literature from the Romantic period to the present, and incorporates disciplines such as cultural theory, film theory, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and post-structuralism to examine various strategies undertaken in the representation of the unrepresentable. By focusing on that most difficult but interesting quality of the monster, its unnameability, it will transform and accelerate current readings of not only the monsters of literature and film, but also those that are the focus of contemporary theoretical discussion.