Abstract
Quotations play an unusually prominent role in organizing and driving the narrative development in My Son’s Story.1 The question for this study is: What impact does the network of three key quotations—from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, Rosa Luxemburg’s prison letter, and John Donne’s poem “The Good Morrow”—have on Shakespeare’s status in Nadine Gordimer’s novel? My method is to elucidate patterns of cumulative meaning in the quotational sequence by tracing how individual quotations, in their order of appearance, modify and build on one another.
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Notes
Nadine Gordimer, My Son’sStory (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990).
Michael Neill, “Post-Colonial Shakespeare?: Writing away from the Centre,” in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 164–85
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 9–18
“The Essential Gesture” (1984), in Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, ed. Stephen Clingman (New York: Knopf, 1988), 285–300
In Stephen Eric Bronner’s Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary for Our Times (London: Pluto, 1981)
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© 2007 Peter Erickson
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Erickson, P. (2007). “Not Shakespeare”: Acts of Quotation in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story. In: Citing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06009-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06009-9_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-7055-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-06009-9
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