Deriving from the Latin monere (to warn), monsters are at their very core warnings against the horrors that lurk in the shadows of our present and the mists of our future – in this case, the horrors of techno-capitalism (i.e., the conjunction of scientific modes of research and capitalist modes of production). This thesis reveals the ideological mechanisms that animate “techno-capitalist” monster narratives through close readings of 7 novels and 3 films from Canada and the United States in both English and French and released between 1979 and 2016. All texts are linked by shared themes, narrative tropes, and a North American origin. Since the corpus emerges from the home of the current techno-capitalist hegemony, it reveals the fears of those who benefit from the system yet are still terrified by its potential. The inclusion of Canadian texts nuances the analysis by taking into account the internal hierarchy of the North American capitalist empire.
The thesis is primarily interested in how texts from three different cultures in the corpus construct their plots, characters, and settings to perform similar kinds of ideological work, that is, the work of representing and critiquing capitalist ideology. Special attention is paid to repeated motifs used to reveal and represent the monstrousness of the techno-capitalist system. The study of these motifs is divided into three sections. The first explores techno-capitalist monsters as personifications of the worst excesses of contemporary consumer culture. The second focuses on the fusion of science and capitalism as dramatized through the figure of the mad corporate scientist. The third reads the corpus as a collection of environmental narratives that comment on the techno-capitalist exploitation of nature. The ideological analysis of the corpus favours a socio-economic hermeneutic but also addresses issues of ethnicity and nationality. A Marxist theoretical approach is privileged throughout, with reliance on Baudrillardian concepts such as the code and the hyperreal
