Experience’s Potential and Potential Experiences: Subjectivity, Alterity, and Futurity in the Late-Apartheid Novels of Nadine Gordimer
Authors
Blair, PeterAffiliation
University of ChesterPublication Date
2019-06-30
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This article begins by scrutinizing divergent critical views of Gordimer’s subject position and authorial agency, which locate her variously on a spectrum ranging from liberal-humanist autonomy to historical-materialist determinism. It then considers how Gordimer’s nonfiction articulates a parallel ambivalence about the reach of the writer’s imagination (and its dependence on “the potential of his own experience”), particularly regarding the ethics and feasibility of creating racially “other” characters. Its main part reads July’s People (1981), in relation to other Gordimer novels, as a similarly self-reflexive engagement with subjectivity and alterity: the otherness of the imagined future (a “potential experience”) facilitates fresh socio-political perspectives, even as the novel expresses philosophical scepticism about such imaginative extrapolation and its textual representation. The article concludes with a new reading of the novel’s “open” ending as a projection of this epistemological conflict.Citation
Blair, P. (2019). Experience’s potential and potential experiences: Subjectivity, alterity, and futurity in the late-Apartheid novels of Nadine Gordimer. Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 41(2), 103-116.Publisher
Société d'Étude des Pays du Commonwealth / Society for the Study of Commonwealth CountriesJournal
Commonwealth Essays and StudiesAdditional Links
http://www.univ-paris3.fr/41-2-spring-2019-nadine-gordimer-de-linking-interrupting-severing-591722.kjsp?RH=1226586296353Type
ArticleLanguage
enISSN
2270-0633Collections
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/