Post-Apocalyptic Shakespeares: Trauma, Memory, and Performance in Station Eleven (2014)

“Some towns, as I was saying, some towns are like this one, where they want to talk about what happened, about the past. Other towns, discussion of the past is discouraged. We went to a place once where the children didn’t know the world had ever been different, although you would think all the rusted-out automobiles and telephone wires would give them a clue.” (Mandel 115). These lines are spoken by Kristen Raymonde in an interview with the town librarian Francois Diallo twenty years post-pandemic in Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a post-apocalyptic romance that explores through narrative how survivors choose to remember the lost past, destroyed by an aggressive, widespread pandemic.

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SPECTRES OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE IN THE POETRY OF PAUL CELAN

The poetry of Paul Celan revolves around a constant, intimate play of remembrance and oblivion, repeatedly unfolding an unrepeatable past. Following the lines of interpretation proposed by Jacques Derrida in Sovereignties in Question, by Anne Carson in her Economy of the Unlost, and by Edward Casey’s phenomenology of remembering, the present article aims to describe how Paul Celan’s poetic images generate and surround the void, abandon themselves to self-effacement and oblivion, while retracing an abstract practice of remembrance and inscribing memory into language.

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