Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart - Bridging Cultural Differences

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1.7 (A-), University of Tubingen (New Philology), language: English, abstract: [...] Usually when we encounter such a book we try to solve those problems with the help of literary strategies and approaches like literary theory, reading about the author and the epoch, studying of interpretations of the work , deconstructing the text and looking at the effects of the text with regard to us readers. Besides these literary strategies, which lead to an interpretation of the text, a linguistic analysis of literary texts helps us either to get a full understanding of the text or to comprehend why we have problems understanding the text. However, the linguistic analysis of literature is not an interpretation; it is more an explanation of how it means and why it means what it does. Linguistics demonstrates why a text is interpreted in this or that way and makes clearer what the underlying problems in the interpretation are.The main aim of this essay is to show and explain the linguistic strategies and mechanisms that enable us to bridge the cultural differences, to demonstrate how cultural knowledge is triggered off and to show how it is possible to learn something about the culture The goal of this essay is to show that readers can understand the text although they have no knowledge of the culture at all. In the first part of this work I will settle the question why it is difficult for us to understand the culture behind the text and give a brief account of the problems with which we are confronted in the process of learning about the culture in the book. In the second and third passage I will introduce and settle the theoretical basis of linguistic strategies that help us to understand the text and to reconcile the cultural contrasts. The following part will show the practical application of the linguistic strategies with examples of Achebe's Things Fall Apart.