Spotlight on the 1996
SIGTel
Online Award Winners and Honorable Mentions
The Nadine Gordimer Internet
Project
R. W.
Burniske
Lowell Monke
International
School of
Kuala Lumpur
50784 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Imagine students reading a Nobel Prize winner's short stories,
analyzing them
with classmates and then corresponding with people in South Africa to
ask questions
prompted by the stories. This project introduced novices to e-mail;
enriched
their study of Nadine Gordimer's fiction; and helped create a greater
context
for the study of South African history, politics, and literature. The
following
quote, excerpted from the "Introduction" to Gordimer's Selected
Stories, served
as our starting point:
What I am saying is that I see that many of these stories could not
have been
written later or earlier than they were. If I could have juggled them
around
in the contents list of this collection without that being evident,
they would
have been false in some way important to me as a writer. What I am
also saying,
then, is that in a certain sense a writer is "selected" by his
subject-his subject
being the consciousness of his own era.
Students at the International School of Kuala Lumpur explored this
idea by
studying Gordimer's stories from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
Following class
discussion, they drafted "story element" reports in small groups,
along with
a "Letter to South Africa" and questions of a critical nature, for
distribution
on the "schoolza" listserv in South Africa. This resulted not only in
correspondence
with black township students in Port Alfred, Afrikaner students in
Pretoria
and Queenstown, "coloured" students in Durban, and British descendants
in Grahamstown,
but also a letter from Nadine Gordimer herself, in response to
questions initially
transmitted through the Internet.
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