It's that I don't think that period would last forever everywhere on earth. WebRotten Tomatoes reports a 98% approval rating with an average rating of 8.1/10, based on 54 critic reviews. The series creator explains why, Station Eleven, like the Shakespeare that sustains it, is something of a miracle, Unlike Andor, Mandalorian is going all in on Star Wars lore. June 24, 2015. By the same token, Station Elevens prophet terrorises the population of the region, assembles a cult, and gains power thanks to a combination of charisma, violence, and cherry-picked verses from the Book of Revelation (Mandel, 2014: 280), where cherry-picked underlines the constructedness of Tylers prophecy. They discuss both shows and recap the events of Station Eleven, then halfway into the podcast, set the two shows against each other in a head-to-head battle. Brennan: Look, Im not calling Station Eleven a failure, or a disaster, or even a half-assed genre entry. As one of the survivors puts it, Elizabeths [the prophets mother] a fucking lunatic (Mandel, 2014: 253). Mousoutzanis, A 2014 Fin-de-Sicle Fictions, 1890s1990s: Apocalypse, Technoscience, Empire. The ships were lit up to prevent collisions in the dark, and when she looked out at them she felt stranded, the blaze of light on the horizon both filled with mystery and impossibly distant, a fairy-tale kingdom (Mandel, 2014: 28). Leggatt, M 2018 Another World Just out of Sight: Remembering or Imagining Utopia in Emily St. John Mandels Station Eleven. TV Details Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Tyler reunites with his mother. Station Eleven. American Literary History, 23(3): 48399. This critique of the sense of an ending is particularly important because, while it may be innocuous in narratives, if we construct history according to a teleological narrative model, we subscribe to determinism and a totalising explanation of the flow of time that risks justifying oppressions as part of a necessary pattern tending towards betterment. There's something about art I think that can remind us of our humanity. We start to plumb the depths of Kirstens soul, forged by suffering, saved by the Symphony and ready to save it, too, by any means necessary. "No countries, no internet, no more Facebook, no more email. But apocalypse, from the Greek apocalyptein, etymologically means to unveil or to reveal, and the revelations of the traditional apocalyptic paradigm are intertwined with time and utopia. For the profound influence of apocalypticism on modernity can also be qualified as a chronic disease of the Western politics and poetics of temporality, a disease characterised by what Derrida called the disorder or delirium of destination (Gomel, 2010: 121). This is, of course, how apocalyptic logic works, with the end ushering in a perfect new world which makes sense of everything that happened before. From Station Eleven to Atlanta, GLOW and more, Christian Sprenger has shot some of TVs most beautiful images. Station Eleven requires audiences to pay attention, offering up a dramatic tapestry of considerable depth. And during the montage of embraces between Jeevan and Kirsten near the end of Dr. Get our L.A. Gomel, E 2010 Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination. Mary McNamara is a culture columnist and critic for the Los Angeles Times. But I fear the social future Station Eleven imagines is implausible, if not disingenuous. | Privacy Policy |, Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/books/station-eleven-joins-falls-crop-of-dystopian-novels.html, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/station-eleven-offers-suspense-and-science-fiction-but-it-is-undoubtedly-a-literary-work/article20577909/, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2014/10/15/sorry-emily-st-john-mandel-resistance-is-futile/, http://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2017.1369386, https://tetheredbyletters.com/when-the-dust-settles-an-interview-with-emily-st-john-mandel/, http://www.publicbooks.org/the-post-apocalyptic-present/, https://www.booklistonline.com/Station-Eleven-Emily-St-John-Mandel/pid=6862248, https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/38e15y/hi_im_emily_st_john_mandel_author_of_station/, http://www.tor.com/2014/09/12/a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel/, Special Collection: Station Eleven and Twenty-First-Century Writing, For the sake of simplicity, in what follows contemporary post-apocalyptic novel refers to the subject of this article, post-apocalyptic fictions written by non-SF authors. I loved Station Eleven because it is the first post-apocalyptic show that revolves around its own holy text, in this case the hypnotic, possibly prophetic, graphic novel Station Eleven. We see its origins as, in flashback, Miranda (with Deadwyler in an equally devastating performance), turns her own experience with trauma and loss into a sort of universal language that connects the past with the future and literally helps save civilization. We were saved because we are the light. A finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner, Emily St. John Mandels best-selling Station Eleven is set in the eerie days of civilizations collapse. Station Eleven. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1057/9781137430144, Munslow, A 2006 Deconstructing History. 2nd ed. 2 De Cristofaro: Critical Temporalities Published in 2014 to critical and popular success, Emily St. John Mandels Station Eleven is part of a widely-discussed, growing corpus of post-apocalyptic novels written by authors who do not typically write science fiction.1 In what Andrew Hoberek (2011) identifies as the genre turn of Washington Post, 15 October. As Mark West points out in another article in this special issue, Clarks reflection addresses but rather miscasts the globalized trade networks in that it fetishizes the beautiful objects at the expense of the workers who make them, workers who are dehumanized into assemblies of working parts (note the emphasis on their hands) (2018: 19, 20). I have seen many, and characters are almost exclusively categorized as hero, villain, victim but never bard, never artist. Thus, while the traditional apocalyptic narrative makes the conjunction of meaning and ending its theme, both in its expressed understanding of history and in its own narrative procedures (Zamora, 1989: 14), Station Eleven, as discussed, leaves readers with the sense of possibility, an open and unwritten future that challenges the closure and determinism of the sense of an ending and that, like the gaps in the fictional history of Cloud Atlas, allows space for human agency.13. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Flawed but engrossing, the craft of HBO Maxs post-post-apocalyptic tale masks its narrative imperfections: As in the Bard, plot gives way to poetry. I was very deliberate in the timing of the narrative: its set mostly fifteen and twenty years after the collapse, not during or in the immediate aftermath (Mandel, 2015: n.pag.). In order to have a good story, there needs to be emotion or entertainment. Station Elevens plot itself consists of fragments from before and after the apocalypse, which challenges the teleological linearity of apocalyptic temporality. The red bandanas turn up and disappear in one fell swoop to provide a cliffhanger between episodes; ditto the strained mystery of the the Prophet. The improbability of it, muses Clark, who is echoed by Kirsten reminiscing about the urban landscape seen from a plane at night: clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations linked by roads or alone. Albany: State University of New York Press. This utopian narrative about the pre-apocalyptic past obscures the material labour that props up the hyper-connected globalised world and the inequalities between the global North and South that lie beneath its seemingly seamless unity. Whats on the other side? This deliberate timing allows Mandel not to dwell on the horror and mayhem brought about by the Georgia Flu, horror and mayhem which are instead at the core of The Roads borrowed world (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 130). [L]ife on earth is just a bus stop on the way to greater glory or greater suffering (Coupland, [2010] 2011: 152) and Bertis understands his murders as partaking in a divinely-sanctioned separation between the elect and the non-elect. Bernstein, M A 1994 Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History. By opening with the apocalyptic end that is foreshadowed by these sentences, Station Eleven highlights not only how the temporal order of the sense of an ending can be imposed on the randomness of time solely retrospectively, but also how this order ultimately implies a future that is already written. Because in stretches the first comes achingly close to being a masterpiece. Toronto: Anansi. As I have argued, the critical temporalities of the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel debunk the apocalyptic conception of history at the core of western modernity as a narrative construct. Mandels novel thus exposes apocalyptic temporality as an artificial teleological order that one imposes on contingency, often with oppressive agendas in mind, as is the case of the prophet. Events unfurl like a Its one of the most profound meditations on love, loss, grief, and community Ive ever seen. An uplifting pandemic drama? Twentieth Century Literature, 46(4): 40533. The super flu it depicts may be deadly, but its also swift, running its course in a matter of days. She has no expectation that anybody else will ever see her work. The concluding discovery of a town with a functioning electrical grid (Mandel, 2014: 311) suggests not the advent of a radical new world and the revelation of a sense-making pattern to history, but, rather, that civilisation might slowly revert to its pre-apocalyptic state and given the positive and optimistic tone of the conclusion, reinforced by the way in which electricity and lights are repeatedly described as beautiful, this, too, indicates the novels problematic celebration of the current system. This article examines Emily St. John Mandels Station Eleven (2014) in the context of the growing body of contemporary post-apocalyptic fictions and what I argue is their critique of the apocalyptic tradition. The dazzling power of electricity floodlights, porch lights, candy-coloured halogens, screens shining, the points of glimmering light that are towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows populates Mandels incomplete list of what is lost in the catastrophe (Mandel, 2014: 312). Goods travelled in ships and airplanes across the world. Alter, A 2014 The World is Ending, and Readers Couldnt Be Happier: Station Eleven Joins Falls Crop of Dystopian Novels. Get Screen Gab for everything about the TV shows and streaming movies everyones talking about. Among the 1% left Himesh Patel and Matilda Lawler in Station Eleven. I dont [sic] think so. Skrimshire, S (Eds.) A Pulitzer Prize winner in 2015 and finalist for criticism in 2013 and 2014, she has won various awards for criticism and feature writing. De Cristofaro, D., Station Eleven is so good, you can buy it outright on Amazon, which sells it for between $28 (DVD) (opens in new tab) and $40 (4K Blu-ray) (opens in new tab). Frame, 26(1): 929. | ISSN: 2056-6700 | Now the television adaptation by Patrick Somerville (known for Maniac and The Leftovers) for HBO, streaming in the UK on Starzplay, is here and resonating. Rather than stressing the end, the emphasis is on the present and its ethical value, as the moment in which individuals take choices that inform the future. The light we carry within us is the ark that carried Noah and his people over the face of the terrible waters (Mandel, 2014: 60). You had to be impressed by that at least. Indeed, Mandel glosses over the blood-drenched years just after the collapse, the first unspeakable years which were, tellingly, spent on the road, travelling (Mandel, 2014: 48, 37). But the recent surge of post-apocalyptic novels brings to the fore this critical tension between the contemporary and the traditional understanding of apocalypse by appropriating apocalyptic tropes to subvert them from within and, more fundamentally, by being essentially concerned with time and history, a concern that is often embodied within their structural narrative features. She was the leader of a band of survivors not because she was a ruthless martial arts expert but because she continued to write symphonies, and understood that music and theater fulfill a deep-seated need. 2010 Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination. Twenty years after the pandemic, when Station Elevens post-apocalyptic narrative strand is mostly set, society has stabilised into an archipelago of small towns, and although almost everything, almost everyone [is lost,] there is still such beauty (Mandel, 2014: 48, 57). The first few episodes look beautiful but move at a stately pace. 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