[Download] "Female Subjects and Negotiating Identities in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies." by Studies in Literature and Language " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Female Subjects and Negotiating Identities in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies.
- Author : Studies in Literature and Language
- Release Date : January 31, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 209 KB
Description
INTRODUCTION Interpreter of Maladies (1999), The 2000 Pulitzer-Prize winning volume of nine short stories, is the first work of Jhumpa Lahiri, the Anglo-American writer of Indian descents. Categorized as an example of the "South Asian American writing" (Srikanth, 1), this book tells of the experience of diaspora and makes the reader acquainted with the complexities and nuances of such an experience. The world that Lahiri portrays in almost all her fiction is set in motion against the cultural tension, anxiety and resultant dialogues that take place when two very different sections of the world--First and Third--in general and Indians and Americans in particular intersect due to a large-scale transnational migration--itself an after-effect of colonialism and globalization respectively. Concerned mostly with the disappointment, failure and at-times success of Indian immigrants in America, Lahiri's stories in Interpreter of Maladies abound with male and female characters who, being displaced, are struggling to survive in the unfamiliar surroundings they are entangled in. One needs to consider though that although most stories are set in The New World, there are still those like "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar" which are based in Calcutta. Yet, no matter what the settings are, all these nine stories are united by the common motif of "exclusion, loneliness and the search for fulfillment" (Mandal, 18). It is the presence of such shared motifs and the existence of subtle relations between the stories that, as Brada-Williams suggests, readers tend to read the collection as a "short story cycle" and not simply as a compilation of separate unrelated stories (451).