The Phenomenon of Romanization in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Collection of Short Stories «Unaccustomed Earth»

The aim of this article is to analyze the genre form of a short story on the example of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short prose in the aspect of the phenomenon of romanization. The subject of the study is the determination of the features of romanization disclosed in the genre structure of the second part of short stories’s collection «Unaccustomed Earth» entitled «Hema and Kaushik». As an object of research the three stories («Once in a Lifetime», «Year’s End», «Going Ashore») united by a common plot were chosen which form the second part of the collection. The relevance of the work is explained by the fact that the study of works of modern multicultural and postcolonial literature in the genre aspect allows us to reveal the features of the functioning and modification of stable genre forms in the literary process. The method of structural analysis and the comparative method have made it possible to examine the process of romanization on the compositional, subjective and spatial–temporal levels of the text and reveal the correlation of the short story form with the American tradition of the genre. The scientific novelty consists in applying the new approach to the analysis of the genre form of this collection within the framework of the concept of romanization. The study concludes that the romanization of a short story is based on the complication of compositional, subjective and spatial–temporal organizations. This leads to the integration of the stories into a cohesive narration united by the several main characters whose names gave the title to the second part of the collection. Besides, the genre strategies of a short story including a narrator’ figure, covering a single event of the past are putting in the front which is expressed in the use of the ending like in a novella.

Jhumpa Lahiri, genre, romanization, short story, novel, novella, composition, subject, space, time