The Study Of Identity In Joppa Lahiri's Short Stories

Indian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri is a relatively young one in the field of American literature.Though her works are limited in number,the high quality of her writings makes a significant impact on American society and wins her lots of important literary awards,including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,Frank O'Connor Short Story Award and so on.Lahiri's works are not limited to short stories,but in terms of literariness and artistic techniques,her short story writing is of more research value compared with full-length novels,and can better reflect her exquisite writing ability as an academic novelist,as well as her active exploration in form.Reviewing her short stories,we can find that the diaspora is the main focus of her description,while subjectivity and identity are the core themes.By analyzing seventeen short stories of the two collections Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth,combined with the background of Globalization,the tradition of diasporic literary writing and the relevant theories of Identity,this paper mainly discusses how writer use the richness of the content and the diversity of artistic techniques in short stories to express the common theme of subjectivity and identity.The body part is divided into three chapters,which correspond to the three dimensions of identity: gender,class and culture.The first chapter discusses gender identity of female characters in Lahiri's short stories,consisting of these three aspects: the representing function of character name and food,the spatial expression of gender structure,the use of different female narrative perspectives.The second chapter explains the class factors in Lahiri's short stories,including the detail description of the characters' material life and the manifestation of their class attribute,the different paths of the two generations of immigrants' identity caused by class mobility,and the reflection on the ubiquitous class barriers and differentiation in the era of globalization.The third chapter focuses on the diaspora group in Lahiri's short stories and their cultural identity,which are unfolded from these three perspectives: “Homeland” belongings,the use of flexible and diverse narrative skills and Intertextuality.This paper finally concludes that by using a variety of writing techniques,Lahiri's short stories not only reflect lives and mental states of the Indian immigrants living in the United States,but also reveal the universality of identity issues in the age of globalization with her broaden horizons and care on common humanity.Thus her short story writings break through the limitation of traditional “diaspora literature” which only emphasizes on the ethnicity,and further respond to the gender structure,class differences,waves of immigration and other social phenomena,as well as their effects on the subject identity.