Abstract

Putting the social imaginary into text is understood as an ideal for better understanding the process of textualisation of the social in the sense that the writer uses it to promote values and meanings. It is from this perspective that Jean Paul Sartre, in Qu’est-ce que la Littérature (1948: 17) writes: [“the writer, on the contrary, deals with meanings”²our translation]. This means that the writer’s literary text remains the site of the manifestation of various arguments and mediations, hence the meaning of “the sociolinguistic situation” of South African writer Nadine Gordimer. Indeed, South African society is the site of a variety of phenomena whose premise is both social and linguistic. In this case, the literary text, from a syntactic, semantic, lexical and narrative approach, is understood as a polemical encounter between languages. In this perspective Gordimer’s text does not only give itself the right to evoke and expose social topics, but it also relies on an aesthetic of exposing social cleavages. For that reason, this contribution takes as a method the sociocritical approach of Pierre Vaclav Zima (2000: 9). For Zima, the social and the historical issues could be grasped at the level of language. This study therefore focuses on the socio-discursive construction of some social wrongs in the post-apartheid South African social environment in order to mediate meaningfully between society and text