Critical Temporalities: Station Eleven and the Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel

This article examines Emily St. John Mandel’s 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. Traditional apocalyptic narratives reveal a utopian teleology to history, a conception of time that deeply informs western modernity and its metanarratives. The contemporary post-apocalyptic novel, instead, is not only predominantly dystopian but articulates temporalities critical of the apocalyptic model of history to make space for unwritten futures which are key to agency. I focus on three elements, which reflect central features of this body of writings – the critical appropriation of religious apocalyptic logic, the critique of utopian teleology, and non-linear narrative structures – and parallel Mandel’s novel with three other key texts of the genre, Douglas Coupland’s Player One (2010), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004).