John Mandel Station 11 Analysis

These two items, a book and a record represent two of the first, and most vital things to penetrate the perfect world of Pleasantville. A book, representing knowledge, and a record, representing freedom of expression are two concepts that Pleasantville was lacking before the introduction of David and Jennifer. These elements escaping the mural represent how these two elements will never be eradicated from this town again. They are simply expanding beyond their confined space despite the constant effort of Big Bob and others. Even the burning of books will not destroy the newly found knowledge that they have discovered. The books themselves, even if they are burning, have wings attached to them. Knowledge, which is being represented by books, is what began the exploration of new ideas and concepts. Knowledge is what let their city expand and what let words appear in books. The other object to break the barrier of the mural is a record. Before the transformation of Pleasantville occurred, the notion of things such as freedom with art and music were incomprehensible. They weren’t nonexistent, as Mr Johnson said

Theme: Emily St. John Mandel, in her novel Station Eleven, uses the literary technique of space imagery to argue that escapism is an immortal practice that is always a choice when facing reality, regardless of how positive or negative that reality is. In Station Eleven space imagery is prevalent, and Emily St. John Mandel uses it to showcase that that act of escaping reality is an immortal practice. In the book there is many a mention to a particular quote form the hit series Star Trek: Voyager. The Symphony is trudging along a vast, sweltering terrain when a topic over a particular episode is broached.

The Literate Arts can also be used has a kind of time capsule. The future needs to know how the past was and what better way than through our literature. Our literature allows the future to know how we communicated, acted, what we believed in, our doubts, our successes and our failures. We could not make progress today without examining our past. Being an Architecture student, I have read a lot of architecture related literature, texts and journals from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s and so on. It was clear one led to another meaning the future looked to the past to learn from their mistakes and build on their successes. Our literature can give access to our soul so the world of the future can know how we thought and why we thought like that. Miller wrote about the book ‘The Information’ by Martin Amis in his text, The Dark Night of the Soul, and showed how Amis believed that this point of literature being important

Casually portraying elements of beauty in the simplest things, Emily St. John Mandel explores the response of a closely related group of characters to a devastating world catastrophe in the novel Station Eleven. While examining themes of art and simplistic beauty, Mandel grabs the reader's attention by moving back and forth throughout time, displaying how art is hidden in every aspect of human life. The novel itself is a post-apocalyptic fictional about the aftermath of a worldwide flu pandemic, the “Georgia Flu,” wiping out most of society.

Music is a form of art that has the ability to connect people from all over the world. When the pandemic hit the world, in Station Eleven, everyone scattered. “On Day Four the food from the Mexican restaurant ran out…they lit their first bonfire on the tarmac, burning newspaper…Someone had raided the Skymiles Lounge,” page 243, Mandel shows how people began living to the point of survival. The Traveling Symphony is a group of individuals who not only worked together to survive, but they also continued to do what they love, “Kristen stood in the state of suspension…a sense of having flown very high…A man in the front row had tears in his eyes,” page 59, and they spread that passion. “Survival is insufficient,” is their motto, but it is also their way of life. This phrase is who they are.

Our world is full of mysterious things. There are different places around us filled with mysterious history. “Keith Albee Theater”, was the popular theater of Huntington, West Virginia in 1940s and now as a performing arts center for Marshall University. Though it was popular for its beauty, it was one of the haunted theater during 1940s (Keith Albee Theater). It is said that “Do not judge book by its cover”,

Thomson Highway’s The Kiss of the Fur Queen has a core theme of art. In this novel, art is integrated into the lives of the characters. The modernist movement would indicate that art has the ability to plainly exist “art of arts sake”. Peter Lamarque notes “To value a work for its own sake is to value it for what it is in itself, not for the realization of some ulterior ends.” (par. 19) This commonly accepted view, that art is valued because it is great art, not for the role or function that it has in society, restricts arts impact. This perspective limits and does not allow for the surfacing of profound effects that art creates. In the Kiss of the Fur Queen, art has power it does not simply exist but has function. The observable function

In Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, Station Eleven, a terrifyingly powerful virus called the “Georgia Flu” sweeps across the world taking out almost every victim it touches. A team of musicians, actors, and backstage members make their way across a pandemic stricken land while hunting, performing, and surviving. They call themselves the “Traveling Symphony”. They’ve been traveling since nearly the beginning of the pandemic, finding and losing members as they go. Throughout the novel, there are several plot lines which run in different directions throughout different time periods, but one consistent theme that ties each twisting plot together throughout the entire novel is that “survival is insufficient”, a quote adopted from Star Trek.

Plot structure Station Eleven is introduced through the death of Arthur Leander, an actor in the Toronto production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a training EMT, instantly springs to the stage in order to offer Arthur aid during his devastating heart attack. The scene is soon overwhelmed with other EMTs leaving Jeevan to comfort Kirsten Raymond, a child actress and unfortunate witness to Arthur’s death. Following Jeevan, information is received directly from one of Jeevan’s close friends concerning the Georgia Flu epidemic, which at the time was rapidly spreading across the globe. Introducing a post-collapse world, Mandel transitions to year twenty with a primary focus on the Travelling Symphony and an older version of Kirsten Raymond,

The attitude of the characters in the novel is perfectly summed up in the motto, “Survival is insufficient:” (Mandel 119). The Travelling Symphony exist in a world of human suffering and misery. Very few

The Art Thief by Noah Charney takes place in multiple settings in different places in the art world, from Italy to a French based society that tracks the works of the Russian painter Malvich, to England, to New York. Two detectives are always in the setting of a nice restaurant, another is a professor’s tour through a museum. With each setting comes a different tone. Overall, the tone of the novel is straightforward and serious, but with room for humor and a bit of suspense. A separate aspect of thee tone is more prominent with each setting.

I will be relating all my art pieces by using the artistic movement, expressionism. According to the art story, this art movement is a modern artistic movement that shows things from a subjective perspective in order to show a change in tone. This movement usually distorts reality to convey the tone.The essay I will be examining is “Back men in public space”. This essay starts off “scary” and moves on to show how lonely the main character is in the world due to his race. This shows a change in tone and has an eerie mood throughout the essay. Additionally, instead of showing how things actually went down, the author purposely distorts it to make him seem like a criminal even though he is not. I will also use the song “Everything Falls Apart”

When traveling to Ohio where they picked up Kirsten, the symphony “lost an actor to some illness on the road” and “got shot at three times” (114). They were not crazy but simply lived for a bigger purpose. In the true spirit of their slogan, the members of the symphony even risked their survival to share their gift of performing. After the flu each survivor undoubtedly struggles to find an explanation for the events. When your whole family dies and the world as you know it is gone an explanation of sort or a reason to go on is essential for survival. In the town the the Prophet, followers believe that they were chosen by a higher being to survive. Their motivation for living on is to uphold the task for which they were artfully selected and act as generation zero for a better world. The Traveling Symphony lives on to do more that just survive and reproduce. They fight to brighten the lives of those still on earth and ensure that the beauty of the world they knew outlives them in its purest form- art. To merely survive is inefficient but to play a role in some bigger task gives the members of the Traveling Symphony something fight

Silence - the natural sound of the Universe. If you were to board a rocket and travel to the unnerving and unforgiving black ink of space, you would hear one thing - Silence. But in the universe of “The Forgetting”, silence is not common. Young Nadia lives in a city that has a supposed “gift” that forces you to lose your memories every 12 years, but when she finds her long lost friend Gray after one of these “forgettings”, she starts to uncover secrets that turn her world upside down. But even with all these secrets and the constant problems that people face, this book has failed to make me hear anything but silence in my mind. But say you’re like me and want to read the book just because the cover is pleasing, let me at least try to convince you against that. In this essay, I’ll share with you three of the things in this book that made me want to slam a door on it and breathe in relief once I flipped over the last page. Trust me when

Since as far back as the ancient Egyptians and the construction of the pyramids to modern day, art and literature has prevailed. Before civilization, art and literature came in the forms of cave drawing then evolved to hieroglyphs. These were not only used to communicate with others, but to also leave messages about dangers in the land. Art and literature has come a long way over the last ten thousand years, but it remains as a form of communication while still leaving messages to others. For as long as they have been around, art and literature have influenced the lives of humans. The fact that cave carvings are almost as old as the human race itself would make it safe to say that art and literature is part of the human genome. In Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven all of the main characters are one way or another connected to art and literature, and as a result, they have a major impact on their lives. An apocalypse breaks out a few weeks after the death of a world renowned actor, Arthur Leander, and the novel proceeds to follow Kristen Raymond, who knew Arthur prior to his death, twenty years after the apocalypse, but occasionally going back in time to characters who are associated with Arthur, including Arthur himself. During the apocalypse, Kristen travels around North America with a group who call themselves the ‘Travelling Symphony’. The Travelling Symphony believes that art, in the form of Shakespeare and classical music should be a part of people's lives,