140359 VO Nadine Gordimer Retrospective: Review of Life and Works (2015S)

The proposed course will trace an arc from the birth of apartheid through to the advent of democracy in South Africa via the life and works of the South African writer and 1991 Nobel Laureate for Literature, Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014). Students will undertake close readings of three of Gordimer’s novels, namely: The Lying Days (1953), July’s People (1981) and her last novel No Time Like the Present (2012); these three novels mark important milestones in an extraordinary writing career spanning more than 60 years. Nadine Gordimer was an implacable opponent of apartheid, which she opposed through her imaginative writing as well as through essays and polemics. The end of apartheid was heralded by the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, and officially ended with the first democratic elections that were held in April of 1994. Gordimer produced fifteen novels before passing away in 2014 aged 90 years. Ten novels fall clearly within the apartheid period, and five that can be classified as falling within the postapartheid period. There is evidence of several general and interrelated shifts in her novels since the demise of apartheid. The previous emphasis on the community and communal responsibility has to some extent been replaced by a relatively greater emphasis on the individual, that is, a move from a stress on public identity to private identity. Local, South African concerns are succeeded by more global concerns. Nevertheless, the final novel No Time Like the Present sees veteran Gordimer turn her keen eye on local trajectories and current South African concerns fully loaded, so to speak, with history.