Go to AfricaBib home

Go to AfricaBib home African Women Go to database home

bibliographic database
Line
Previous page New search

The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here

Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:'Where the banalities are enacted': the everyday in Gordimer's novels
Author:Pearsall, SusanISNI
Year:2000
Periodical:Research in African Literatures
Volume:31
Issue:1
Pages:95-118
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subject:literature
About person:Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014)
External link:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v031/31.1pearsall.html
Abstract:Nadine Gordimer's novels, laden with political issues and catalogues of details revealing South African life in its mundane specificity, render accounts of the intrusions of the political into the everyday that arose from apartheid's microscopic definitions of criminal behaviour. As a result, critics have speculated throughout her career that her concern with South African politics may have harmed her fiction. The present author, however, argues that Gordimer's work, reflecting the realities of South African life, blends art and politics, and shows how the discordant elements of a revolutionary subjectivity can unexpectedly surface from within the mundane. By confronting an artistic politics with a critique of its sources in the everyday, Gordimer's work avoids aesthetic banalility. She creates a kind of 'revolutionary aesthetic' that emphasizes the interplay of politics and private life in the construction of subjectivity in South Africa. Bibliogr., ref.
Views
Cover