Thinking about Language, Self and the World. We take for granted, don’t we, our ability to use language, rarely stopping to consider the way that everything we say or write or hear or heed not only reflects our world but creates it as well.

Thinking about Language

Thinking about Language, Self and the World. Paper instructions: We take for granted, don’t we, our ability to use language, rarely stopping to consider the way that everything we say or write or hear or heed not only reflects our world but creates it as well. Take, for instance, the language of a baby’s cry or the song of a whale. Consider the toe points of a ballerina or the rhyme of a poet. Think, too, about the rhythms of a drum or the tears at a loss. Such things—these things and others like them—are among the most powerful of gifts and tools that we have.

Thinking about Language

Thus it should be, then, that we pause for a moment and reflect on the very idea of language. What does it offer the world? What would our world be like without it? Are we as individuals, communities, cultures, and societies created by language? Do we use it for good or for ill? Is language a tool of dominance and domination? Is it a weapon that can build and create, topple and destroy? Or is it a system of possibility, dialogue, understanding, and hope? To what extent do we as individuals—and as a collective group—use language to create, assert, and maintain an identity?

Thinking about Language

And, just as importantly, to what extent are we as individuals—and as a collective group—limited by the very system of language that we use to present ‘self’ and to know ‘other.’ Topic: Consider the above questions, and others like them, in a well-thought-out and carefully and academically written essay. I do not, of course, either expect or want you to answer all of the questions…rather I want you to formulate your own focus, arrive at your own point of discussion, and provide me with plentiful and specific examples that support your ideas, making use of the Week 1 readings if you choose.

Thinking about Language

Length: Aim for at least 3 pages of double-spaced text. “The Unknown Citizen” (Auden): https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Unknown_Citizen.pdf “The Pedestrian” (Bradbury): http://www.riversidelocalschools.com/Downloads/pedestrian%20short%20story.pdf “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Eliot): https://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html “Group Minds” (Lessing): https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/duncan.hasell/engl1302/readings-for-module-3/group-d-obedience-to-authority/group-minds-lessing. https://youtu.be/RKK7wGAYP6k

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