Once Upon a Time

“Once Upon a Time”

• Genre: Fiction; short story; contemporary fairy tale
• Originally Published: 1989
• Reading Level/Interest: Grades 11-12; college/adult
• Structure/Length: Approx. 10 pages; approx. 20 minutes on audio
• Protagonist and Central Conflict: The main narrative is set up when the narrator, a writer, is approached about writing a children’s story but declines. After being awakened in the middle of the night, the narrator lies awake and imagines a “fairy tale” about a white family in South Africa that descends into racist paranoia and turns their home into a fortress, with disastrous consequences.
• Potential Sensitivity Issues: Apartheid in South Africa; racism; violent death of a child

Nadine Gordimer, Author

• Bio: 1923-2014; born into a middle-class Jewish family in Springs, South Africa; published her first story at age 15; wrote novels, essays, and short stories; addressed exile, alienation, and the effects of apartheid in many of her works; lectured and taught in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s; won the Booker Prize for her novel The Conservationist (1974); was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991
• Other Works: Face to Face (1949); The Lying Days (1953); Burger’s Daughter (1979); July’s People (1981); My Son’s Story (1990); Jump and Other Stories (1991); Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century (1999); The Pickup (2001); No Time like the Present (2012)

CENTRAL THEMES connected and noted throughout this Teaching Unit:

• Township Uprisings of 1984-1985 and the End of Apartheid
• South Africa’s Mining Industry, Exploitation, and Personal Wealth
• Fairy Tales and Children’s Safety

STUDY OBJECTIVES: In accomplishing the components of this Unit, students will:

• Gain an understanding of how authors use fiction to highlight real-world political, historical, and social issues.
• Study paired texts and other resources to make connections to the text’s themes of Township Uprisings of 1984-1985 and the End of Apartheid and South Africa’s Mining Industry, Exploitation, and Personal Wealth.
• Emulate the structure of a fairy tale in their own retelling of the text.
• Analyze and evaluate the author’s craft to draw conclusions in structured essay responses regarding fear, frame narratives, Fairy Tales and Children’s Safety, and other themes and topics.