The Incomplete Resolution of Heteropolarity in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story

• Main Authors: Chin-shuo Lee, 李青朔
• Other Authors: Stephen Ohlander
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/6a5r2e

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 97 === The aim of this thesis is to explore how the problem of heteropolarity in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story is resolved. Heteropolarity denotes the state or quality of something being other to such a degree that it is actually opposite. My concern here is to see how Gordimer sketches the characteristics of the emergent order through her representations of problematic coloured politics, and how, in honing the novel, she discredits an act of interpretive colonialism. The introductory chapter provides an overview of the term “coloured.” It also highlights significant aspects concerning the Manichean opposition, including Abdul JanMohamed’s idea of colonial Manicheanism, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, and Michel Foucault’s definition of a heterotopia. These three aspects of heteropolarity—Manicheanism, heteroglossia and heterotopia are explored in the following chapters. Chapter Two examines Gordimer’s attempt to destabilize the binary oppositions that structure racial difference through the tale of a coloured family by analyzing her novel in the light of both Fanon and JanMohamed’s idea of colonial Manicheanism. Chapter Three explores the peripheral nature of the coloured community, which reflects this period of transition, as far as the novel’s cautionary disruption of representing the white woman as object of the black man’s desire and the black woman as the colonized feminine in colonial narrative is concerned. Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia in the polyphonic novel elucidates these ironies foremost. Chapter Four examines Fanon’s idea that colonial space was compartmentalized into the site of an irreconcilable antagonism. On the basis of this insight, Foucault’s theory of heterotopia and his view of geography’s disciplinary space explicate the incomplete achievement of a nonracial order longingly anticipated by Gordimer. The concluding chapter focuses on the incomplete resolution of heteropolarity in My Son’s Story and affirms Gordimer’s attempt to construct a nonracial South African identity at a transitional moment of revolution.