On The Traumatic Themes Of Nadine Gordimer’s Novels

Nadine Gordimer(1923-2014) is the South Africa woman writer, and have abundant works. She repeatedly won the awards of European and American literature in her writing career. Her works are of great interest because she profoundly analysis the apartheid. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.Her works go crossed the period of apartheid in South Africa and recorded the social transformation. She sharply castigated the apartheid system by the white government.Her works presented the abnormal society and the traumatic races harmed by the apartheid. She used the power of words to write trauma, and the trauma writing almost throughout her writing career. In this thesis, it will start from the perspective of trauma narrative and the author is going to select four representative works of Gordimer to analysis her traumatic narrative, in order to do a systematic and comprehensive explanation by using the method of combine theory with text reading.This paper consists of three parts: introduction, the text part and the epilogue.The introduction part first presents the translation of Gordimer’s works in domestic and the researches of her works at home and abroad, then summarizes the main content, the research ideas and the significance of this thesis.The text part consists of four chapters. The first chapter started from the theory of traumatic narrative, introduced how trauma on the medical research turned into the literature field, and then analysis the reason why Gordimer focus on traumatic narrative. It mainly embodied in two aspects: on one hand trauma projected the personal experience of Gordimer, on the other hand, it originated from South Africa traumatic history. Based on the two factors, the thesis analyzed the different points between Gordimer and other African novelist and black writers. The second chapter analyzed the ethnic trauma of the blacks, whites and marginalized groups in South African. They had encountered in the long colonial history. The ethnic trauma from apartheid, and the black, white, and marginal groups are the victims of this system.The third chapter of interpretation is Gordimer’s family trauma, Gordimer with exquisite brushwork focused on the trauma of individual, who suffered from apartheid and domestic misfortune in their childhood. Chapter iv parsing Gordimer’s cultural trauma, the author from the perspective of cultural identity, analysis works in the search for people of different skin color of cultural identity. Black in a white dominated society lost our nation’s traditional culture, into a position of aphasia;White immigrants in South Africa also has the identity crisis, marginal groups of color of skin not black not white, they have not classified secret anguish.