Progress and Feminist Literary Criticism: The "New Eras" of Nadine Gordimer

It has often been suggested that reading Nadine Gordimer’s novels and stories chronologically allows the reader to track the development of her opposition to apartheid, and feminist critics have tended to read her depictions of women as out of step with this increasing radicalism of her antiracism. This chapter argues that there are moments in Gordimer’s fiction which self-consciously associate literariness and the act of writing with the disruption of teleological models of political progress – that is, the texts challenge the interpretative frames which have been used to read them. Through this it asks whether the particular qualities of literary writing might contribute to our understanding of those uneasy political histories (like that, perhaps, of feminist English Studies itself) in which predictable development is disrupted.