Jump and other stories: Gordimer's leap into the 1990s: gender and politics in her latest short fiction

Abstract

This article examines Nadine Gordimer's latest anthology Jump and Other Stories (1991) in the light of her political trajectory to date and in the light of her earlier stories. Gordimer's sensitivity to the moods and discourses of the current moment in South Africa is shown via an exploration of the topoi of the jump, the hunt and the enclosure. The formal innovations in the anthology — attempts at narrative multivocality, temporal complexity and authorial dethroning — are also examined. Finally, the author's complex, puzzling and sometimes retrograde representations of women and her attitudes to Feminism are shown to be in out of synchrony with her radical political attitudes.