Writing After the "Poor Little Bomb": Fictionality and Sabotage in Nadine Gordimer's The Late Bourgeois World

Attwell, David

doi:10.1353/elh.2020.0009

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Here, the correspondence between Gordimer's novel and Camus's The Stranger are immediately clear on the level of plot and sentiment: like Meursault, the narrator receives a telegram notifying her of a death, one to which we expect her to respond emotionally. Instead, as David Atwell (2020, pp. 283; 275) notes, the tone is “flat, clinical, observant and ironic” (p. 284), recalling the “detached narration” (p. 283) of The Stranger in its “sardonic matter‐of‐factness” (p. 284) and “hyper‐observant, estranged perspective” (p. 283).…”

Section: Modernism In the Late Bourgeois Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Life and reality are indeed elsewhere, outside the world of narration, so that it is entirely apt that the narrative is not “charged with … the intimate … textures of real life” (Cornwell et al., 2010, p. 12). In The Late Bourgeois World narratorial disidentification reflects the limitations of realist narration within this context, producing a novel that “performs the useful function of confessing with maximum honesty its own poverty and the poverty of its times” (Hesse, cited in Attwell, 2020, p. 283).…”

Section: Modernism In the Late Bourgeois Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Inequality, legitimacy and disidentification: From South African to global modernism

Emmett

2022

Literature Compass

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Entrenched inequality within South African society has led to a notable focus within literary criticism on the subject of legitimacy. The perennial question of who has access to narrative representation and how this authority is wielded has informed literary production itself-with some writers, invariably emerging from the elite, attempting to circumvent or undermine the assumed claims of legitimacy which attend the novel. This article discusses how a particular modernist form, narratorial disidentification, coheres around this preoccupation with inequality and legitimacy, overturning idealist accounts of moral agency in history through an emphasis on the determination of the material environment. Narratorial disidentification subverts the normative structure of the novel, assuming that the legitimate subject of society is not narratable within the novel form. Drawing on the work of Warwick Research Collective (WReC), in particular their expanded sense of modernism, this article argues that experiences of social bifurcation in semi-peripheral locations are translated into this form of narrative coldness which seeks to undermine readerly identification and emphasize externality. It indicates how Camus's The Stranger can be productively re-read by considering the employment of this form by a number of South African novelists-from Nadine Gordimer's The Late Bourgeois World under apartheid, to postapartheid with Zoë Wicomb's Playing in The Light and

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Section: Modernism In the Late Bourgeois Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Modernism In the Late Bourgeois Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%