lit review

The focus of my dissertation is the literature of Emily St. John Mandel, with a particular focus on her last three published works: Station Eleven (2014), The Glass Hotel (2020), and Sea of Tranquility (2022). I aim to discuss the enduring presence of hope throughout her novels and examine other themes, such as the permeance and enduring legacy of art and Mandel’s treatment of capitalism. Secondly, I aim to analyse narrative techniques and formal aspects of her work. Finally, I seek to interrogate how Mandel offers counter-narratives against pessimistic novels, most notably the emerging neo-naturalist texts, and offers a different, radically optimistic perspective on the human condition.

The bulk of the existing literature on Mandel is written about Station Eleven (SE). Broadly speaking, they fall under three categories: 1) where SE falls within the wider context of post-apocalypse stories; 2) the enduring presence of art in the post-apocalypse world; and 3) the representation of capitalism, of which, most argue, the novel seems to be nostalgic for. 

Articles by Max Feldner and Marco Carriccialo examine SE in relation to other post-apocalypse stories. The latter argues that contrasting temporal dyadic worlds highlights SE’s use of absent objects and frequent analepses to the pre-Georgia Flu world is where SE differs from other post-apocalypse stories (238). I aim to apply this idea of a dramatic temporal upheaval of the storyworld to Mandel’s other novels. Feldner’s article is also useful in discussing SE’s hostile treatment of religion, which can also be applied to Sea of Tranquility (SoT) (171-2).

Another article, ‘All the world’s a [post-apocalyptic] stage’: The Future of Shakespeare in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven’ successfully applies James Berger’s theories of concerns about what happens after the end of the world being central to post-apocalypse fiction. He also pushes back against the argument that the novel is exclusively about how ‘survival is insufficient’ and how a huge chunk of SE is actually devoted to survival (Conoway 10).

All of the above articles also discuss the permeance of art in Mandel’s works. Conoway, in particular, highlights the blurring of high/low art with regards to Shakespeare and Miranda’s unpublished comic being held in the same regard. But, for a more sustained article of this topic, Carmen M. Méndez-García’s article is especially useful in relation to the permeance of art and in particular the function of the Museum of Civilisation. Ideas on art are also applicable, in almost all cases without the author realising, to The Glass Hotel (TGH).

Perhaps the most important article to my reading of Mandel’s novels is Tore Rye Andersen’s article ‘Snow globes and instant coffee,’ where he convincingly synthesises Frederic Jameson’s theories with SE. He outlines Jameson’s ‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping,’ a mode of storytelling which explores the vast interpersonal relations inherent in a disorientating ‘world space of multinational capital’ (np). He goes on to mention that SE presents the reader with ‘global figurations that are both more banal and more sublime than Jameson could have imagined,’ thereby answering a call for literature and art that can actually represent or at least approximate the totality of global capitalism, something hitherto impossible. 

Although he limits himself to SE, Andersen’s application of Jameson’s theories to Mandel can also apply to TGH, which also achieves this ‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping’ through its use of unnatural narratology. Jan Alber et al’s Dictionary of Unnatural Narratology is my initial starting point here, in particular the “We” Narration definition and the sources contained therein, such as Brian Richardson’s ‘Representing Social Minds: “We” and “They” Narratives, Natural and Unnatural’ and his ideas around denarration also.

Also applicable to TGH, is Gerald Prince’s ‘The Disnarrated.’ My thesis aims to push back on his notion that ‘the disnarrated is clearly not essential to narrative’ (4). TGH features an instance where it in fact is, in the character of Alkaitis, which Mandel dubs ‘the counterlife,’ in order to construct individual subjectivity essential to the narrative process (109).

As might be evident from the application of theory to SoT and TGH, as of right now, there is limited literature discussing her other two novels. There are only two pieces of secondary research worth mentioning regarding TGH. The first is an MA Thesis by Caroline Shepherd for the ​​Victoria University of Wellington entitled Crisis in the Kingdom of Money: Representations of Systems, Class, and Work in the Fictions of the Global Financial Crisis. The second is an article called ‘The Carnivalesque in Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men and Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel: A Bakhtinian Reading.’ The latter is a surface level reading of Bakhtinian elements in TGH, often devolving into a checklist, with little substantive discussion of the effects. Some good points are made, however, such as articulating that the carnivalesque is used to depict the struggles of the proletariat during financial uncertainty. 

Shepherd’s thesis, however, provides a useful companion piece to Andersen’s ideas, exploring how TGH represents capitalism. In particular, her examination of the ‘kingdom of money’ is sublime. She contextualises the 2008 recession in TGH with the wider fiction that emerged in the interim period. A lot of which is applicable to my own argument of Mandel upheaving character lives and to Carracciolo’s argument of dyadic worlds. 

There is no substantive secondary material available on Sea of Tranquility. I imagine this lack of serious scholarly work is because of the recency of TGH’s and SoT’s publication, being 2020 and 2022 respectively.

Although it can be used in the introduction to contextualise Mandel as a writer, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction contains a chapter called ‘Hope’ by Emily Horton that is useful for my final chapter. She does not overtly refer to Mandel in this article, instead analysing Ben Lerner and Ali Smith, but points she raises are useful. She argues: ‘What connects [Lerner and Smith] conceptually… is a concern with contrasting temporal orders, and with how certain temporalities explored within modernism promise more genuine forms of hope for the present day...' SE and TGH both exhibit this mode of storytelling. So too is the idea of ‘the past’s importance to the present, as well as the moment’s potential to envelop meaningful change’ important to these novels (331). Other chapters, such as ‘Globalisation,’ ‘Sincerity,’ ‘Realisms,’ ‘Anthropocene,’ ‘Finance,’ and ‘The Past’ are also be useful to this thesis.

Finally, there are practicalities that I feel warrant addressing. There are two monographs in particular that my institution does not have access to and I have thus been priced-out of them. They are: Apocalyptic Fiction by Andrew Tate and Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction by Susan Watkins. These are names that crop in articles numerous times and shall potentially be acquired further down the line for more background knowledge.

WORKS CITED

Al-Hajaj, Jinan F. B., and Abdul Hussein. “The Carnivalesque in Hari Kunzru’s Gods without Men and Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel: A Bakhtinian Reading.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Taylor & Francis, Feb. 2024.

Alber, Jan, et al. “Dictionary of Unnatural Narratology.” Projects.au.dk, 2023, projects.au.dk/narrativeresearchlab/unnatural/undictionary. Accessed 23 Apr. 2024.

Andersen, Tore Rye. “Snow Globes and Instant Coffee: Transparent Commodities and the Global Infrastructures of Late Capitalism in Contemporary Fiction.” Textual Practice, Taylor & Francis, May 2023.

Caracciolo, Marco. “Negative Strategies and World Disruption in Postapocalyptic Fiction.” Style, vol. 52, no. 3, 2018, pp. 222–41. JSTOR.

Conaway, Charles. “‘All the World’s a [Post-Apocalyptic] Stage’: The Future of Shakespeare in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.” Critical Survey, vol. 33, no. 2, 2021, pp. 1–16.

Feldner, Maximilian. “‘Survival Is Insufficient’: The Postapocalyptic Imagination of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.” Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, Sept. 2018, pp. 165–79.

Horton, Emily. “Hope.” The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction, Routledge, 2018, pp. 321–32.

Mandel, Emily St. John. Sea of Tranquility. Picador, 2022.

---. Station Eleven. Picador, 2014.

---. The Glass Hotel. Picador, 2020.

Méndez-García, Carmen M. “Postapocalyptic Curating: Cultural Crises and the Permanence of Art in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.” Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 50, no. 1, 2017, pp. 111–30.

Prince, Gerald. “The Disnarrated.” Style, vol. 22, no. 1, 1988, pp. 1–8.

Richardson, Brian. “Denarration in Fiction: Erasing the Story in Beckett and Others.” Narrative, vol. 9, no. 2, 2001, pp. 168–75.

---. “Representing Social Minds: ‘We’ and ‘They’ Narratives, Natural and Unnatural.” Narrative, vol. 23, no. 2, 2015, pp. 200–12.

Shepherd, Caroline. Crisis in the Kingdom of Money: Representations of Systems, Class, and Work in the Fictions of the Global Financial Crisis. 2023.