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‘All the world's a [post-apocalyptic] stage’
The Future of Shakespeare in Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven
in Critical Survey
Author:
Charles Conaway
Charles Conaway
University of Southern Indiana, USA
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Abstract
Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 novel, Station Eleven, follows the Traveling Symphony, a small troupe of actors and musicians who perform concerts and stage Shakespeare's plays in the scattered communities of survivors of an influenza pandemic. Tattooed on the arm of Kirsten Raymonde, an actress in the troupe, are the words ‘Because survival is insufficient’, a phrase borrowed from Star Trek: Voyager, indicating that the works of Shakespeare and Beethoven can enrich the lives of the survivors of the pandemic. But even if survival in this post-apocalyptic landscape is considered insufficient, it cannot be taken for granted. In a world without electricity and modern technology, encounters with strangers on the road occasionally turn confrontational, even deadly. The novel thus dramatises a constant struggle that complicates the idea that survival is insufficient, and ceaselessly probes the notion that Beethoven and Shakespeare can enrich our lives in post-apocalyptic times.
Contributor Notes
Charles Conaway is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana, where he has taught since 2007. His research focuses on adaptations of Shakespeare and the circulation of his cultural authority from the time of his death to the present. He has published articles on adaptations of Shakespeare during the Restoration and eighteenth century and in modern popular culture. He is currently working and publishing on late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century novels that imagine the circulation of Shakespeare in post-apocalyptic and other post-traumatic stress-inducing times.