By “the Flash of Fireflies”: Multi-Focal Forms of Critique in Nadine Gordimer’s Late Short Story Cycles

Abstract

Nadine Gordimer’s late short stories in Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Loot use a fragmentary, non-linear form to depict their contemporary society as a multi-temporal present that is haunted by its colonial past. By blending different narrative modes, including moral fable, political allegory and social realism, the stories engage with the injustices of a capitalist world-system in post-apartheid South Africa that are manifested simultaneously across different temporal and geographical scales.