Re-imagining the city: From urban apocalypse to urban utopia (Switzerland, Tom Stoppard, H. G. Wells, Terry Gilliam, Anthony Burgess, Kathy Acker, Le Corbusier)

Michel de Certeau writes of the city as a site on which governments, professional planners and common people contest their beliefs, desires and ambitions, and shows how this contests creates a city that is simultaneously the "machinery and hero of modernity." This dissertation examines a series of modern and postmodern urban fantasies which intensify this description by casting the contest for the city in apocalyptic dimensions. It places the speculative and imaginary city represented a genre of anti-utopian fiction and film alongside the texts of urban planning, urban history and sociology, and feminist geography.; This dissertation begins by examining early modern representations of the city in H. G. Wells's fictions of urban apocalypse and urban redemption, and also focuses on a modernist vision of urban utopia articulated most forcefully by Le Corbusier. It concludes with a discussion of postmodern representations of the crisis of the contemporary city in a film by Tom Stoppard and Terry Gilliam, and a novel by Kathy Acker. My study uses visions of the city to plot the transition from the modern to the postmodern, identifying two anti-utopias by Anthony Burgess as a transitional moment for a genre of anti-utopia, and using his works to introduce a concept of the postindustrial/global city. This dissertation maps the transition from modern to postmodern onto the changing geography of the urban landscape. The discussion offered of the evolution of anti-utopian fiction and film coincides, in other words, with a discussion of the evolution of the modern metropolis, the changing dimensions and features of the urban landscape.