Honors Program
University Honors, Honors in English
Date of Award
5-2016
Thesis Professor(s)
Karen Kornweibel
Thesis Professor Department
Literature and Language
Thesis Reader(s)
Matthew Fehskens, Lindsey C. King
Abstract
Bharati Mukherjee’s 1989 novel Jasmine and Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2003 novel The Namesake both feature immigrant protagonists, who experience name changes and identity transformations in the meeting space of Indian and American cultures. Using the theory of cultural translation to view translation as a metaphor for identity transformation, I argue that as these characters alter their identities to conform to cultural expectations, they act as both translators and translated texts. Although they struggle with the resistance of untranslatability via their inability to completely assimilate into American culture, Jasmine and Gogol ultimately gain the ability to bypass the limitations of a foreigner/native binary and enter a space of negotiation and growth.
Publisher
East Tennessee State University
Document Type
Honors Thesis - Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Traister, Laura, "Immigration and Identity Translation: Characters in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake as Translators and Translated Beings" (2016). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 335. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/335
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.