Abstract
In recent years, the practices of symptomatic reading have been called into question by scholars such as Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, Cathy N. Davidson, David Theo Goldberg, Rita Felski and Bruno Latour. It is claimed that such reading has become either formulaic or politically inefficacious. This article argues, against such thinking, that Emily St. John Mandel’s Arthur C. Clarke award–winning novel Station Eleven (2014) presents several challenges for an age of so-called post-critical reading. Given that this novel is, in some ways, about how the future will ‘read’ our present, I use the metaphor of ‘metadata’ here to think through the series of ruined objects in Station Eleven that project a hyperobject-like extent across two epistemic contexts. I argue that this is a comment on interpretative reading practices and an invitation for politicised symptomatic readings of the novel. Using this approach, I show that Station Eleven is a novel that is deeply concerned with global warming and with colonial nationalist legacies, even while such concerns appear buried—or even absent—within the novel. If one takes the novel’s surface instruction to look for ‘another world just out sight’, these concerns of the early twenty-first century emerge as central to the forking futures of Mandel’s work.
Highlights
For several decades, academic English departments have devoted substantial intellectual energy to an understanding of how we read
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is the claimed predictability of such against-the-grain interpretative paradigms and politicised unveilings that has led Rita Felski and others to feel dissatisfied with the symptomatic reading practices that developed from the Althusserian schools, regardless of how ethically sound such approaches may continue to seem (Felski, 2015: 4)
Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus even went so far as to point out, almost ten years ago that it has ‘become common for literary scholars’ in symptomatic traditions ‘to equate their work with political activism, the disasters and triumphs of the last decade have shown that literary criticism alone is not sufficient to effect change’ (Best and Marcus, 2009: 2). It may be, as Bruno Latour puts it for the social sciences, that this Kantian-derived mode of critique is ‘running out of steam’
Summary
The practices of symptomatic reading have been called into question by scholars such as Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, Cathy N. Clarke award–winning novel Station Eleven (2014) presents several challenges for an age of so-called post-critical reading. Given that this novel is, in some ways, about how the future will ‘read’ our present, I use the metaphor of ‘metadata’ here to think through the series of ruined objects in Station Eleven that project a hyperobject-like extent across two epistemic contexts. I argue that this is a comment on interpretative reading practices and an invitation for politicised symptomatic readings of the novel. Using this approach, I show that Station Eleven is a novel that is deeply concerned with global warming and with colonial nationalist legacies, even while such concerns appear buried—or even absent—within the novel. If one takes the novel’s surface instruction to look for ‘another world just out sight’, these concerns of the early twenty-first century emerge as central to the forking futures of Mandel’s work
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