The Construction And Deconstruction Of An Ideal City

This dissertation focuses on the utopian city images in utopian novels of British and American literature from ancient times to the present and tries to explore the features of utopian cities in the development process of formation, prosperity and transmutation as well as the interaction between the utopian cities and real cities in specific historical context. The utopian city denotes ideal city, which contains the imaginary cityscape, custom, physical life, cultural fashion, idea as well as political and economic systems. The dissertation briefly describes British and American utopian literature diachronically and fixes its attention on analyzing imaginary cities in some representative utopian novels from different angles. Contemporary western urban theory are frame of reference in our researches. Based on textual close reading, with the adoption of interdisciplinary methods and cross identification between literature and history as for its research method, the dissertation discusses not only the textual images of ideal cities, but also reveals the interaction between the utopian cities and real cities in certain historical,social,and political context.This dissertation is composed of foreword, five chapters and ending.The foreword summarizes the definition of utopian genre, gives a brief account of the historical outline of utopian literature, and generally reveals the transmutation of the ideal cities in the west urban utopian history. The foreword also briefly explains the methods, the academic background of this subject and the theories and practical significance of this study.Chapter One discusses the ideal city images of utopian literature from its origins. Ancient Greek culture and Hebrew culture are the major sources of the western utopianism. Confronted with the crisis of Athens Polis, Plato reminisced about the lost Atlantis and conceived a just ideal polis in his Republic, which also reveals the unjust elements in the ideal polis. In the Bible, Jerusalem undergoes destruction and redemption because of its evil and becomes the New Jerusalem, which shows the condemnation of the evils in real cities and the wish for an ideal city. Thomas More, the pioneer of utopian literature, took London as the prototype of the ideal city in Utopia and criticized contemporary England society.Chapter Two focuses on the urban scenery and spiritual culture of the ideal city in modern utopian novels. With the comparison the old Boston with the new one, Bellamy's Looking Backward reveals American urban crisis at the end of 19 th century and unfolds a future Boston in all its splendor, which promotes the first prosperity of American utopian literature. As the finest utopian novel in modern literature history, News From Nowhere envisions that London is integrated with rural areas in the future and becomes a sustainable garden city with the harmony between man and nature.Chapter Three discusses the deconstruction of the ideal city in modern British and American anti-utopian literature. The future London could be the symbol of ideal city in many modern utopian novelists' imagination. Conversely, London's future is gloomy and dark in the novels of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Technological advancements could bring about affluent society, but they could also lead to the suppression of human nature. In particular, when technology allies with totalitarian ideology, the ideal city so many have been expected turns into a city of Panopticon where the human beings becomes a means, not an end and loses his/her freedom to choose and has no independent thinking, let alone the possibility of all–round development. American novelist Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 gives a warning that the future consumer society would lead to urban alienation. In his imaginary book-burning city, super-reality made by mass entertainment culture reality seems more attractive than real life and brings about superficial urban culture and lunatic revelry, which becomes American society's future in miniature.Chapter Four summarizes the transmutation of ideal city in contemporary ecotopian novels. After summarizing the features of the new sub-genre of utopian literature, this chapter analyzes the ecotopian cities represented in the works of Ernest Callenbach, Paul Auster and Octavia Butler. Ernest Callenbach was optimistic about San Francisco's future. He thought it would become an ecological city after its independence from the U.S..Other novelists such as Paul Auster and Octavia Butler were not so optimistic. Writers of ecotopian fiction have extrapolated the present urban condition to expose a cautionary dystopian vision of cities and urban life in the near-future when the ecocatastrophe caused by pollution, population explosion and climatic anomaly may result in the collapse of cities with the hideous blow of migration, famine and plague.Chapter Five focuses on the features of cyberspace and future cities in e-topia. The rapid advancements in information technology and the emergence of cyberspace bring up cyberpunk fiction, the main theme of which is to envision what the urbanized cyberpunk virtual space is like. In Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, because of nuclear warfare and space migration, Los Angeles has been a shrinking city where virtual reality produced by the empathy box keep urban life functioning normally. William Gibson's Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash provide a postmodern mapping of future urbanism where the social condition of the polarized inequality produces dual cities due to the decline of government functions and the outspread of multi-national corporations, which results in two juxtaposing urban landscapes: the extremely wealthy burbclaves upgated from the gated communities and the extremely poor outlaw zone as the manifestation of the worst possible consequences of today's urban blight, segregation, pollution, and poverty. The cyberpunk virtual space which could be an ideal city turns out to be the mirror image of the dual city.