Abstract

REVIEWS Nadine Gordimer: Writing and Being. [The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1994.) (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Haryard University Press, 1995). 145 pages. US$ 18.95. ISBN 0-67496232-X This volume comprises six lectures Nadine Gordimer gave at Harvard University during 1994. Since this was the year in which the South Africa' s first free and democratic elections took place, it represented the culmination of a decades-long struggle against apartheid and, thus, marked a caesura in the history of South African literature, too. Prior to the early 1990s most writers of any renown, Gordimer being one of the most prominent of them, had aligned themselves, albeit in many and various ways, with that struggle; from the 90s onward they will be stepping out in new directions, hopefully evolving hitherto unexplored ways of describing a different kind of society. Since Gordimer' s book thus appears at a time of remarkable upheaval in South African literature and society, readers will certainly ask how it reflects this period of change, whether it attempts some reassessment of the past and what it teIls us ofthe views ofSouth Africa's Nobel-prize-winning author at what must, after aIl, also be a moment of significant transition in her own literary