Reinscribing genres and representing South African realities in Nadine Gordimer's later novels (1979-1994)

Nadine Gordimer works with a range of established literary forms in order to examine the realities of social life in South Africa. As a novelist and social critic, Gordimer tries to raise awareness about injustice in South Africa and, in particular, to explore how literary forms may be used either to promote or to question the cultural biases and rigidly compartmentalizing social categories that gave rise to the policy of Apartheid. In her novels, Gordimer suggests that traditional, black South African cultures have been irretrievably transformed by colonialism, capitalism, and Apartheid. She also suggests that White South Africans should come to terms with the diverse cultural reality and changing social conditions of the society. By working within the bounds of familiar conventions and traditional genres--the bildungsroman, the gothic, colonial travelogues, holocaust narratives, the picaresque, and so on--Gordimer simultaneously conveys her message to a mainstream audience and manages to evade South Africa's strict censorship laws.; Chapter One frames the main issues in the dissertation, and presents an overview of existing critical approaches to Gordimer's corpus. Chapter Two shows how, in Burger's Daughter (1979), Gordimer rewrites the bildungsroman to explore the effects of censorship, and to raise the possibility of integration in a new, postapartheid South Africa. Chapter Three contends that, in July's People (1981), Gordimer refigures domestic, gothic, colonial travel, and holocaust narratives to record the experiences of black South African migrants, to offer a nuanced view of cultural exchanges occurring between black and white South Africans, and to expose the fundamental similarities between Apartheid and Nazism. Focussing on A Sport of Nature (1987), Chapter Four traces Gordimer's use of the picaresque to raise the question of whether, and how, white South Africans will be able to integrate culturally and to participate in postapartheid society. Chapter Five discusses My Son's Story (1990) and argues that, in a period of reform, Gordimer invests narrative authority in a "coloured"--that is, an ethnically hybrid--implied author, and in so doing tries to question the legal categories, biases, and flat stereotypes that previously pervaded South African culture. Chapter Six examines how, in None to Accompany Me (1994), Gordimer criticizes legal narratives that created segregated social spaces in South Africa and, more generally, how her novel exposes the evasive rhetoric used to institute various social engineering policies under Apartheid. The dissertation concludes by considering Gordimer's own insistence on the role of fiction as a means of imagining and describing new, more integrated social spaces in South Africa.