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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