Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Gordimer, Nadine (Vol. 17) - Jeanne Colleran (essay date 1993)

Gordimer, Nadine (Vol. 17) - Jeanne Colleran (essay date 1993)

Jeanne Colleran (essay date 1993)

SOURCE: "Archive of Apartheid: Nadine Gordimer's Short Fiction at the End of the Interregnum," in The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer, edited by Bruce King, St. Martin's Press, 1993, pp. 237-45.

[In the following essay, Colleran discusses the ways in which socio-political conditions in South Africa inform Gordimer's work.]

It is obvious that the archive of a society . . . cannot be described exhaustively . . . on the other hand it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from these rules that we speak . . . it emerges in fragments.

Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge

All of Nadine Gordimer's fictional projects could be described as working to construct an archive of apartheid, a record which as an artist she is bound to keep, transcribing the 'consciousness of her era' (Selected Stories), however much that consciousness is...

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