Introduction to Language and Culture

Firstly, the war caused a huge problem to Maha, a 12-year-old girl, who lost her parents and her older sister after a bombing in the Muslim area of the city. Moreover, she has to take care of her younger brother who is 6 months old, while they threaten to separate her from him. Maha’s suffering is demonstrated when she explains to Karim, “What’s important is that I don’t have anything left to lose. Except Jad. You say we’ll be killed before we

Through this book, an average American high school student can learn academically through this book. This book teaches the reader about different forms of perspective. This book is told through each character’s perspective and can be seen as a learning tool for young writers. In addition to the perspectives, another benefit of reading this book is the literary devices used through it. For example, a common literary device that can be found throughout the story is the use of cliffhangers. They leave the reader in suspense and they often happen at the end of chapters. The story features many diverse squads of soldiers and their experiences are split into chapters. The use of cliffhangers leaves the reader waiting for their favorite character’s story to come back. Finally, the reader can take organization skill from this book. Throughout this story, the events of different characters happen at the same time and Mark Bowden divides the experiences through the chapters. A high school student can take this style of writing and utilize it throughout their literature. As well as teaching a student academically, the story provides social benefits.

It is a well known fact that experiencing war changes people; there is an innocence that is forever lost. In Tim O’Brian’s, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, Mary Anne Bell is an unusual example of the innocence that is lost in war because unlike the rest of the soldiers, she is a woman. Mary Anne’s transformation from innocent “sweetheart” to fierce warrior left readers with mixed emotions because although Mary Anne felt at peace with her transformation, she was also disconnected from reality.

The text, ‘The Things They Carried', is an excellent example which reveals how individuals are changed for the worse through their first hand experience of war. Following the lives of the men both during and after the war in a series of short stories, the impact of the war is accurately portrayed, and provides a rare insight into the guilt stricken minds of soldiers. ‘The Things They Carried' shows the impact of the war in its many forms: the suicide of an ex-soldier upon his return home; the lessening sanity of a medic as the constant death surrounds him; the trauma and guilt of all the soldiers after seeing their friends die, and feeling as if they could have saved them; and the deaths of the soldiers, the most negative impact a war

Part III: theme analyses of Farewell to Manzanar 1)Title-Farewell to Manzanar, published in 1973, was written by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston. It is a classic memoir of the life and struggles of a young Japanese internee and her family at Manzanar during World War Two. The title, "Farewell to Manzanar," automatically sets a theme of grief, sadness, and loss. The significance of the title throughout the book, is that Jeanne is forced to say "farewell" to her father, friends, and previous lifestyle atone point in time. During the time she lived at Manzanar, she had become a different person with a different perspective on life. Once she had left Manzanar, she had realized that her life there was the only life she knew how to

Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is a novel that is a personal view of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Vietnamese soldier. Like the American novel “The things they carried”, this novel brings about the effects of war on people, and especially how it defeats the human capacity for things such as love and hope. Bao Ninh offers this realistic picture of the Vietnam War’s impact on the individual Vietnamese soldier through use of a series of reminiscences or flashbacks, jumping backwards and forwards in time between the events most salient in memory, events which take on a different theme each time they are examined. His main protagonist Kien, who is basically Bao himself, looks back not just at his ten years at

The Viet Nam War has been the most reviled conflict in United States history for many reasons, but it has produced some great literature. For some reason the emotion and depredation of war kindle in some people the ability to express themselves in a way that they may not have been able to do otherwise. Movies of the time period are great, but they are not able to elicit, seeing the extremely limited time crunch, the same images and charge that a well-written book can. In writing of this war, Tim O'Brien put himself and his memories in the forefront of the experiences his characters go through, and his writing is better for it. He produced a great work of art not only because he experienced the war first hand, but because he is able to convey the lives around him in such vivid detail. He writes a group of fictional works that have a great deal of truth mixed in with them. This style of writing and certain aspects of the book are the topics of this reflective paper.

In the memoir of Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Beah states that his life’s journey has been a huge obstacle, but has learned to overcome that struggle by venting while the two contradictory sides continue their battling. Beah accomplishes his goal of explaining to the reader his point of view through the use of rhetorical questions, scenic narration, and parallelism. Ishmael Beah’s apparent purpose is to share personal accounts of his life with his fellow country men, in a country where war affects people to a level beyond the imagination. He is able to apply his purpose using a grotesque and bitter tone. Beah approaches his audience of ordinary people in this manner in order to vent his feelings about war by

Comparably, Ooka Shohei also utilizes theatrical effects in his story as a tool to convey unconventional themes such as cannibalism that happened among Japanese troops oversea. Ooka is a survivor-author with personal experience of war’s dehumanizing nature when he was drafted abroad to the Philippines during the Pacific War. Thus, his work, “Fire on the Plain,” which serves the therapeutic purpose as Ooka recovered from wartime trauma, is somewhat based on his direct experiences. However, the book reads more like a fictional account of the war by focusing on the psychological turmoil. When working on provoking readers’ sympathy with the agony suffered by Japanese soldiers stranded in an unfamiliar land, Ooka has to overcome the problem of possibly

Both Beah and Kamara describe what it is like to live under the cruel conditions of the war, and although these authors lived in similar world, filled with blood and horror, their life stories are fairly divergent. Beah’s story includes the lives of many people who were also involved in the war. “Some people tried to hurt us to protect themselves, their family and communities...This was one of the consequences of civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy. Even people who knew you became extremely careful about how they related or spoke to you,” (Beah 37). Ishmael Beah wrote about the wartime experience for the community as a whole, rather than solely about himself. He included how even people who were close were able to turn on each other due to the high levels of paranoia. Kamara, on the other hand, wrote mainly about her own story and how she survived the war. This can still be informative, but Ishmael Beah is able to make himself more relatable by including in his memoir the ways in which everyone was affected.

In this essay, I will discuss how Tim O’Brien’s works “The Things They Carried” and “If I Die in a Combat Zone” reveal the individual human stories that are lost in war. In “The Things They Carried” O’Brien reveals the war stories of Alpha Company and shows how human each soldier is. In “If I Die in a Combat Zone” O’Brien tells his story with clarity, little of the dreamlike quality of “Things They Carried” is in this earlier work, which uses more blunt language that doesn’t hold back. In “If I Die” O’Brien reveals his own personal journey through war and what he experienced. O’Brien’s works prove a point that men, humans fight wars, not ideas. Phil Klay’s novel “Redeployment” is another novel that attempts to humanize soldiers in war. “Redeployment” is an anthology series, each chapter attempts to let us in the head of a new character – set in Afghanistan or in the United States – that is struggling with the current troubles of war. With the help of Phil Klay’s novel I will show how O’Brien’s works illustrate and highlight each story that make a war.

As long as there has been war, those involved have managed to get their story out. This can be a method of coping with choices made or a way to deal with atrocities that have been witnessed. It can also be a means of telling the story of war for those that may have a keen interest in it. Regardless of the reason, a few themes have been a reoccurrence throughout. In ‘A Long Way Gone,’ ‘Slaughterhouse-Five,’ and ‘Novel without a Name,’ three narrators take the readers through their memories of war and destruction ending in survival and revelation. The common revelation of these stories is one of regret. Each of these books begins with the main character as an innocent, patriotic soldier or civilian and ends in either the loss of innocence and regret of choices only to be compensated with as a dire warning to those that may read it. These books are in fact antiwar stories meant not to detest patriotism or pride for one’s country or way of life, but to detest the conditions that lead to one being so simpleminded to kill another for it. The firebombing of Dresden, the mass execution of innocent civilians in Sierra Leone and a generation of people lost to the gruesome and outlandish way of life of communism and Marxism should be enough to convince anyone. These stories serve as another perspective for the not-so-easily convinced.

Why is this question ambiguous and why is it interesting to note that this question is ambiguous?

Language is the universal connection that brings all humans together. We share this common ground to communicate. The three major points that I would like to focus on are: How does language influence our culture? Does it define us, or does it refine us? And lastly, the impact that language has on our societies.

Originally, linguistics was my intended major. Recently, I decided to switch my major to anthropology, and more specifically, the field of linguistic anthropology. For the linguistics major, one of my requirements for transferring to a university was to take a language and culture class. Several of the first lectures focused on the history of linguistics and anthropology. I was introduced to the idea that language, thought, and culture all influence each other. This meant that studying language, when divorced from the concept of culture, creates a myopic view of linguistics. It had never occurred to me that linguistic does not occur in a vacuum and needs to be examined alongside the culture it is associated with. Seeds of change were then sown in my mind. As the class progressed, I found myself growing more interested in the subject as a whole, and so anthropology became my major.