The first topic, psycholinguistic and cognitive aspects of lexical semantics, is addressed in the first two chapters. This area is particularly active but relatively ignored in computational circles. The reasons might be a lack of precise methods and formalisms. This area is, however, crucial for the construction of well-designed semantic lexicons by the empirical psychologically based analysis introduced in the domain of computational lexical semantics.

“Polysemy and related phenomena from a cognitive linguistic viewpoint” by Alan Cruse surveys the ways in which the contribution of the same grammatical word makes to the meaning of a larger unit depending on the context. Two main explanatory hypotheses that account for contextual variation are explored: lexical semantics and pragmatics. Alternatives to this approach are studied in the other parts of the volume.

The second chapter, “Mental lexicon and machine lexicon: Which properties are shared by machine and mental word representations? Which are not?” by J.-F. Le Ny, sets language comprehension and interpretation within a general cognitive science perspective. Properties common to natural and artificial semantic units (e.g., denotation, super-ordination, case roles, etc.) are first explored. Then, problems related to activability and accessibility in the memory are addressed in both a theoretical and experimental way.

The interpretations of Gordimer's work I have offered indicate strong connections with contemporary intellectual trends. I have characterized her fiction as containing a working-through of her own micropolitics, and an associated articulation of geopolitical concerns. The novel sequence betrays a development and refinement of central themes, and the early work is very significant in this development: even in the first three novels Gordimer conducts a critical examination of European literary forms, evincing a concern to fashion a cultural identity and expression appropriate to the goal of political change in South Africa. A phase then ensues in which the politics of textuality assumes central significance: the novels up to The Conservationist express with an increasing urgency a conviction about the importance of discursive practices as the sites of power, and here the concern with micropolitics and geopolitics is closely allied with the construction of narrative form. This becomes more explicit in Burger's Daughter where Gordimer fashions a novelistic form which, through its problematized narrative perspective, reinforces her implications about the ideological function of discourse. There is, then, an increasing literary self-consciousness in Gordimer's work which reaches a peak in the self-reflexiveness of My Son's Story, and (especially) A Sport of Mature.

This characterization of Gordimer's career – in which the logic of the early novels produces an increasingly explicit literariness in the later ones – is an account which suggests affinities between Gordimer's work and important postmodernist trends, where one finds a stress on textual construction as one of several areas of crossover with poststructuralist thought.

The most recent phase in Gordimer's novel sequence is characterized by a metafictional quality: this is not an entirely new development since there are deliberations about the function of technique and form in her previous novels. In A Sport of Nature (1987) and My Son's Story (1990), however, this tendency is both more pronounced and more overtly self-reflexive, focusing – often ironically – on her previous treatment of issues now taken up again. This principle of self-reflexive intertextuality in both novels makes their full signification dependent upon a knowledge of Gordimer's earlier work.

A SPORT OF NATURE

In some ways A Sport of Nature is Gordimer's most ambitious novel to date: it offers, as its organizing principle, an exaggerated re-evaluation of the issues and forms of her previous novels. This lends the book a ludic, metafictional quality which sets it apart from her earlier works. This novel is written at one remove: it is a book about her previous books, and this is what anchors a work that investigates the variety of interpretation to which personal and historical action can be subjected. The result is a novel which, viewed as a conventional work of realism, appears to be radically uncertain in its narrative stance, in its view of purposive political action, and in its conclusions about historical change.

Gordimer's next three longer works of fiction are all unique in their forms and scope, and demonstrate the range of the author's developing narrative skills. These works – The Late Bourgeois World (1966), A Guest of Honour (1970) and The Conservationist (1974) – embody a range of techniques, produced, in part, by Gordimer's desire to react against and build upon previous work. There is also, however, a unifying principle in this group: each of these works is governed by a single, dominant intertextual presence which inspires both the issues treated in each novel, and the manner in which they are treated. These are by no means the only fictions in which quotation from, and allusion to, other texts occurs: the distinctive feature is that each of these novels stands in a transtextual relationship to a single, dominant textual source, and this principle of transtextuality determines a unique period of creativity.

THE LATE BOURGEOIS WORLD

In a 1979 interview Gordimer observed that The Late Bourgeois World ‘shows the breakdown of my belief in the liberal ideals’. Such a breakdown, as the preceding chapter suggests, was under way in the first three novels; but here it surfaces emphatically in the disruptive form of this arresting novella.

Nadine Gordimer, a white South African, is her country's most famous writer, and in that particular conjunction – of national identity and literary fame – lies the tension which is the determining feature of her career: her position as a consistent, and increasingly radical, critic of apartheid is a position located, to some extent, within the power-group it would challenge. Yet if there is an inevitable (unwanted) complicity for Gordimer as a white, middle-class South African citizen, it is due only to her refusal to exile herself that she has been able to articulate the nature of that complicity, and this is the focus of her extraordinary achievement: her oeuvre – the sequence of novels in particular – comprises the most significant sustained literary response to apartheid extant.

Gordimer was born on 20 November 1923 at Springs near Johannesburg, the daughter of immigrants: her mother, Nan Myers, was born in England, and her father, Isidore Gordimer, was a Jew who emigrated from Lithuania at the age of thirteen. Gordimer was brought up at Springs and attended the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg for one year. Her first marriage was in 1949, and she was married again in 1954 to Reinhold Cassirer.

In the novel sequence up to The Conservationist Gordimer comes to articulate with increasing clarity the logic that underlies all her work: that discursive practices create and promulgate ideology and that, consequently, such practices are the sites of the contestation of power. In this sense her growing literary self-consciousness, far from signalling an intellectual withdrawal from political reality, affords an appropriate way of investigating the role of novelistic discourse in the broader network of ideological discursive practices. The overt transtextuality of The Late Bourgeois World, A Guest of Honour and The Conservationist represents one way of conducting such an investigation: these novels themselves become sites of discursive interaction in which very different discourses – promulgating political aesthetics, anti-colonial revolution and ethnic mythology – are tested and contested at length through the construction of a fiction. In Burger's Daughter (1979) and July's People (1981) Gordimer continues her investigation of discursive practices, but in a different context focusing specifically on the construction of individual identities. These novels also represent continuity with the previous group in that a revolutionary context supplies the impetus of the investigations.

BURGER'S DAUGHTER

In Burger's Daughter Gordimer takes her examination of the committed white South African to a new plane: here she considers the ethical dilemmas and choices of someone effectively born into a tradition of white political resistance; or, more precisely, of someone whose commitment has been, and continues to be, determined by a particular ideology.

Gordimer's first three novels, The Lying Days (1953), A World of Strangers (1958) and Occasion for Loving (1963) form a distinctive group: in their forms they appear more traditional than the later novels, and this initial greater reliance on novelistic convention seems to marry with the liberal vision of political opposition in the 1950s, which Gordimer shared, prior to the Sharpevilie massacre in 1960 (which occurred during the writing of Occasion for Loving). Yet this view of the early novels, though helpful in broad terms, can be taken to suggest a polarization between Gordimer's early and later novels, and this is inaccurate: there are discernible phases in Gordimer's career, but there are no clear breaks, and these early novels incorporate important preliminary challenges to, and innovations in, novelistic form; elements which are taken up more radically in later work. The early novels also treat thematically issues which become central to the formal and structural ordering of the later novels, and even here such themes have an impact, at times, on form and structure. In various respects, then, these three novels have an importance that cannot be overlooked.

THE LYING DAYS

The Lying Days concerns the partial growth and acquisition of race consciousness of its first-person narrator, Helen Shaw, through adolescence and young adulthood. The book has an autobiographical element, especially in its descriptions of landscape and town – many of these details are drawn from Gordimer's memories of her youth.

Gordimer's reputation as a short story writer is difficult to pin down. Especially since Robert Haugh's study privileged the ‘poetic intensity’ of the short stories above the novels, which he regarded as relative failures, the stories have often been seen as examples of a kind of technical perfection, or aesthetic completeness, which some critics deem to be a feature of fully realized short stories. My view of the Gordimer stories is that they work ironically with this notion of ‘aesthetic completeness’ in the tradition of key modernist innovators such as Joyce and Mansfield. The importance of Gordimer's contribution to the short story genre is not in doubt, even if the nature of this contribution (and, consequently, the nature of short story poetics) is a matter for debate. The major problem with the Gordimer stories, however, is manifested through the inevitable comparison with the novels.

Establishing an overview of a writer's short story oeuvre is always a difficult venture, particularly if clear stages of development are sought, and this is especially the case with a writer like Gordimer who has produced a series of major novels: the short stories may appear as a more occasional means of expression. This does make it difficult to trace lines of development, and, if such lines are found, one has to consider carefully how much significance should be attached to them.

Gordimer's writing career to date has run in parallel with the era of apartheid in South Africa, an era in which the racist organization of South Africa was systematically intensified through legislation and brutal state control following the election to power of the Nationalist Government in 1948. Apartheid (separateness) was a political programme of separate development supposedly justified by the perception of Africans as a distinct subspecies of humanity, inferior to whites, and who had no historical claim to the territory of Southern Africa. Despite the manifest contradiction of biological, archaeological and historical evidence contained in these underpinnings, the political programme might appear, at least, to have had its own coherence; even this, however, is rapidly dispelled by the manipulative machinations of apartheid and the contradictory way in which it buttressed itself through the attempted control of individuals. Prominent measures of early apartheid rule (especially for Gordimer) include the prevention of inter-racial relationships, and the arbitrary division of black Africans into ten separate ‘nations’, each confined to a designated ‘homeland’. (Selected key events in modern South African history, including those mentioned or alluded to in Gordimer's fiction, are listed in the chronology.)