Table of Contents JAMES DEWEY American Dichotomies: WCW, Descriptivists, and Reality Television ....................................................... 3 SECTION I: Education and Social Issues TAMAR SHIOSHVILI Some Aspects of Managing Diversity in the U.S. ........................................................................................ 5 MAIA KUTATELADZE Language Definition and its Relation with Culture .................................................................................... 10 SALOME GVICHIANI Obesity as a Social and Health Problem in the U.S. ................................................................................... 21 ELENE SHENGELIA Women Assuming a New Role during World War II (Rosie the Riveter)……. ........................................ 29 NINO CHAVCHAVADZE The Role of the U.S. in Establishing Democratic Principles in Georgia - on the Example of Georgian 2012 Parliamentary Elections ..................................................................................................................... 34 SVETLANA DEMURCHEVA Accents and Dialects of America ................................................................................................................ 41 NINO DANELIA The Beginning of the U.S-Georgian Cooperation in the Areas of Politics and Education ......................... 52 MARIAM ZARNADZE Marriage Traditions in the U.S. and in Georgia .......................................................................................... 59 MARIANA MIKADZE Human Political and Social Aspects of Animal Care in America .............................................................. 65 IRINA BAKHTADZE NINO ELBAKIDZE The US–Cuba Economic Relationships Since 1990s.................................................................................. 71 SECTION II: Literature and Women's Issues SALOME GOGBERASHVILI Power of Women Voters in American Politics in the Last Decade ............................................................ 80 1 KETEVAN ANTELAVA American Women Philanthropists: From Decorative Arts to Avant-garde ................................................ 87 GEORGE SHADURI Ivan Turgenev and Henry James: the Epistolary Legacy ............................................................................ 94 TAISIA MUZAFAROVA Left without Future: A Comparison of Dystopian Novels by Ray Bradbury and George Orwell………103 TAMAR KOBESHAVIDZE Modern Interpretations of Holden Caulfield Portrayal (J.D. Salinger’s Novel The Catcher in the Rye)……….……. ..................................................................................................................................... 109 ELISO PATSKAVA On Publication of “Ulysses” in “The Little Review”................................................................................ 117 MAKVALA (BAIA) KOGUASHVILI New Journalism in American Literature – Tradition or Innovation.......................................................... 123 NATIA KVACHAKIDZE Thematic Parallels between Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” and John Updike’s “Olinger Stories” ...................................................................................................................................................... 129 NATALIA IMEDASHVILI William Somerset Maugham on Classic American Literature ................................................................. 136 ELENE MEDZMARIASHVILI Kennedy Administration Policy in Women Issues ................................................................................... 143 SECTION III: History, Art, Economics INGA KAZARIAN Rouhani’s Foreign Policy: Diplomacy is Possible? .................................................................................. 151 TEA CHUMBURIDZE Racism against Native Americans: A Look at the Bottom ....................................................................... 158 NINO GIORGADZE The most Popular Fashion Magazines in the U.S.A (Cosmo, Vogue, Glamour)………………………..166 NINO BARIKHASHVILI Rap Music, the Voice to the Voiceless ..................................................................................................... 178 NINO GAMSAKHURDIA Abraham Lincoln Phenomenon ................................................................................................................ 186 2 American Dichotomies: WCW, Descriptivists, and Reality Television JAMES DEWEY The first time I encountered the poem “This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams, I was in Dr. Kimberly Johnson’s creative writing class at Brigham Young University. She asked us, “What makes this a poem?” Since then, I have re-read the poem many times and enjoyed asking that same question. The poem reads like a note from a husband (Williams?) to his wife, apologizing—albeit non-apologetically—for having “eaten/ the plums/ that were in/ the icebox.” In Johnson’s class, some of my fellow students said it was definitely a poem. They pointed to the syllabic structure in the three stanzas (12-12-13), the ambiguous title, the tongue-in-cheek humor, and the uniquely American cadence. Other members of the class said what looks like a poem, lives in a poetry book, and was written by a poet must be a poem. Still other students said it isn’t a poem at all. Whatever you think that particular text is or is not, it is definitely memorable—and it is definitely American. Physician and writer William Carlos Williams—often referred to by his initials “WCW”—was born September 17, 1883, in Rutherford, New Jersey, and he died there on March 4, 1963. Originally associated with Ezra Pound and the Imagist movement, Williams later rejected that school and blazed his own poetic path. Known for writing poems on his doctor’s pad between house calls, Williams observed America come into its own and he wrote sometimes political, sometimes confessional lyric. In his choice of language, he strove for a uniquely American idiom which he described as “language modified by our environment, the American environment.” Williams bemoaned T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland which, he said, “returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit.” Contemporary with Williams, Pound, and Eliot was the so-called Descriptivism movement in the field of linguistics. Instead of telling people how to speak in a “proper” way (Prescriptivism), linguists became more and more interested in describing how people speak and why. One of my favorite examples of a fictional Prescriptivist in action is Henry Higgins, a character from the 1965 Broadway musical My Fair Lady based on the stage play Pygmalion by George Bernard Cultural Affairs Officer at the United States Embassy in Georgia, Tbilisi. 3 Shaw (which in turn was based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses). What the Higginses of the last century abhorred as language degeneration, the new wave of Descriptivists saw as language change (and progress?) in action. Where the Prescriptivist played the role of all-knowing Editor, the Descriptivist looked at language as a natural phenomenon that should be studied in its native element—wherever and whatever that might be. The Prescriptivist called the written grammars king, but the Descriptivists proclaimed a linguistic democracy where the native speaker had a voice in determining what could and couldn’t be said. So why not grab the note on the refrigerator and call it a poem? In the American television show Survivor, the elements described above start to bleed together in a popular format. The participants’ daily speech is held up as worthy of framing—in this case through a camera lens— and recording and viewing. The show claims to draw on the ideas of Descriptivists by calling itself a “reality show.” The language is real, the emotions seem real, and the injuries are definitely real. But is this really about survival? The contestants are acutely aware that the show is a game and they speak directly to the cameras. A medical team is constantly on hand to assist. And perhaps most strikingly, the all-seeing Editor decides back-to- front which reality the viewer experiences. All of this begs the question: which part of this framed reality is really real? The American reality is one of constant dichotomy. It is both the plain idiom of Williams and the sophisticated mystery of Eliot. It is imbued with influences both Prescriptive and Descriptive. It is the reality show—and the real people watching the show. References: 1. Ferguson, Salter, and Stallworthy (ed.), (2005). Norton Anthology of Poetry 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams 3. William Carlos Williams, (copyright 1962). “This is Just To Say” 4 SECTION I: Education and Social Issues Some Aspects of Managing Diversity in the U.S. TAMAR SHIOSHVILI The United States is becoming more culturally diverse and the great majority of workers joining the labor force are minorities, immigrants and woman. According the report of the Hudson Institute on work and workers for the twenty-first century (Workforce 2000) non-whites, women, and immigrants will make up more than five- sixths of the workforce in the nearest future. (Johnson, 1987, p. 8) In 1997, nearly one in ten people in the U.S. was foreign-born, the highest rate in more than fifty years. In proportional terms, the foreign-born accounted for 9.3 percent of the total U.S. population, well below the high mark of 14.7 percent in 1910, but almost double the rate since the low point in 1970 and continuing an upward trend since then. Hispanic