Original scientific paper
Post-Apocalyptic Memory In Doris Lessing’s the Memoirs of a Survivor and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven: When “Survival Is Insufficient"
Vanja Vukićević Garić
; University of Montenegro
Abstract
Even though they deal in predictably different literary manners with the post-apocalyptic topic in terms of style and certain poetical and narrative features, The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) by the Nobel-prize winner Doris Lessing and Station Eleven (2014) by the contemporary Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel are both focused on the issues of survival, preservation and revitalization of the fundamental categories of humanity after a civilization has collapsed. This is carried out through investigations into the concept of memory at individual and collective level through the links between memory and creative imagination, as well as by means of questioning not only social and historical, but also psychological and ontological boundaries between the pre-lapsarian and the post-apocalyptic world. Drawing on some of the most relevant theoretical and literary definitions of “critical dystopias” and “critical utopias” (Moylan, 2000; Moylan, 2014; Seyferth, 2018) and analyzing ideological and philosophical implications of the core scenes and aspects of narrative construction of these two novels, this paper aims at showing that actually both of them affirm hope and new possibilities for the humanity not only beyond, but also within the dystopian landscapes they present.
Keywords
post-apocalyptic world; memory; retrospective narration; textualization of experience; ontological borders; critique of capitalism; utopian enclaves.
Hrčak ID:
267363
URI
Publication date:
16.12.2021.
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