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Placing Spaces: Style and Ideology in Gordimer’s Later Fiction

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The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer

Abstract

Across one of the pages that precedes our acquaintance with Lionel Burger’s daughter occurs a solitary inscription from Claude Lévi-Strauss: ‘I am the place in which something has occurred.’ Indeed, much has occurred — both outside and inside Gordimer’s writing since those early stories in which she first began to express a critical love for the place about which she writes: South Africa, its placement of her as a white woman, and her placement of it as a writer — one who rearranges worlds in the spacing of words. Much has changed since one of the earliest stories, ‘Is There Nowhere Else Where We Can Meet?’ was written in 1945. In that story, written before the word apartheid had been minted as official currency,1 there seemed ‘Nowhere Else’ than the arena of violence for white to meet black, though a desire on Gordimer’s part for there to be some other place is palpably present; she has since sought to create such a place in and through her writing.

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Authors

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Bruce King

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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Macaskill, B. (1993). Placing Spaces: Style and Ideology in Gordimer’s Later Fiction. In: King, B. (eds) The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22682-5_5

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