Representations of writers as public ntellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre, Nadine Gordimer, Gao Xingjian and Pablo Neruda

Lee, Jenny

Representations of writers as public ntellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre, Nadine Gordimer, Gao Xingjian and Pablo Neruda

Thesis / Dissertation

2003

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

This thesis takes as its subject the various public roles and representations of writers, using Said's 1993 Reith lectures on the subject of the intellectual as a starting point. The main questions raised are how writers, in various political and historical contexts, have functioned as public intellectuals, and how they have negotiated the tensions between their various private and public commitments and responsibilities, whether artistic, social, or political. To gain insight into these issues, this thesis turns to the essays, memoirs and lectures ofJean-Paul Sartre, Nadine Gordimer, Pablo Neruda and Gao Xingjian. Chapter I is concerned with Sartre's attempt to systematize a conception of the writer as an intellectual through the writer's commitment in the work itself. Chapter 2 looks at the development of Gordimer's explorations of her own positioning in such a public role, as well as how these explorations point towards a transformative view of literature. Chapter 3 sets up a comparison between Neruda and Gao, who share an important conviction that literature provides an "alternative" historical record of human experience despite their opposed ideas regarding the writer's relationship to society. As winners of the Nobel Prize for literature, these writers have been "officially" recognized as public intellectuals, and thus their emblematic position affords an important opportunity to examine how such writers deal with public pressures, clarify their commitments and attempt to construct a feasible identity within the matrices of art and politics. By looking at their nonfictional and often deeply autobiographical writings, this thesis hopes to locate these writers at their most candid, reflective and even contradictory moments, in which they attempt to delineate a certain credo that informs their public and private activities as writers.