English 410X: Nadine Gordimer

Grose 336

9 a.m. - 12 noon

I am not a preacher or a politician. It is simply not the purpose of a novelist. I am totally opposed to apartheid and all the cruel and ugly things it stands for, and have been so all my life. But my writing does not deal with my personal convictions; it deals with the society I live and write in. I thrust my hand as deep as it will go, deep into the life around me, and I write about what comes up. My novels are anti-apartheid, not because of my personal abhorrence of apartheid, but because the society that is the very stuff of my work reveals itself. The suffering inflicted by White on Black, the ambiguities of feeling, the hypocrisy, the courage, the lies, the sham and shame—they are all there, implicit. If you write honestly about life in South Africa, apartheid damns itself. --Nadine Gordimer in a 1977 interview
 

Nobel Prize-winning novelist and short story writer Nadine Gordimer is one of the most important writers in English because of the way she articulates the bold and dangerous questions that test the limits and possibilities of human relationships and white identity in an era of decolonization. For over sixty years, Gordimer has been exploring the deep contours of human experience in her native South Africa. She repeatedly finds in her works how the human spirit and imagination resist and transcend the rigid racial divisions imposed upon human relationships by apartheid in South African and the other more or less formal systems around the world that attempt to dehumanize us all.

This course will focus on reading and discussing selections from Gordimer’s short stories as well as the novels Burger’s Daughter (1979), July’s People (1981), and The Pickup (2001). We will also explore the social, historical, and political context in which Gordimer writes, but our goal will be to attend to how a writer like Nadine Gordimer offers the subtle tones and profound insights that transform experience and let us imagine the most intimate places and moments of a whole new world.

Nobel Prize Homage to Gordimer's life and work
BBC's Gordimer Page
Steinwand's South Africa Links
Salon Interview with Nadine Gordimer (1998)