Adresser + Message + Receiver / Context =

Contemporary writers deal with current world wide concern issues. In the midst of globalization multicultural influence falls upon writers, their readers and in fact every single human being that has access to the everyday more easily available free information found in the internet , or anyone in contact with someone who does. An issue such as identity in a climate of cultural alienation continues to be relevant and has been discussed by authors of the former and present century in their literary works.

In the literary works assigned for discussion in the last session of our seminar, aspects of the immediate culture and physical context the authors belong to are highlighted, which is consistent with what seems to be a trend in the Caribbean writers. However, Anthony Kellman's poem Bajan and Kendel Hippolyte's a caribbean exorcism poem, do not portray the spoken language variety's sonorant quality as those of many of their fellow writers do. In this sense, Grace Nichols experiences a dilemma that she puts into print in her essay The Battle with Language. Acknowledging the multicultural influence of the culture she feels part of, the Caribbean, she is driven to use Creole over standard English, or rather a combination of both. However, there are times when she as a poet had preferred to use the standard English; that was the case when the poem had an intended audience with which she would communicate more effectively by using standard English. Parochial aspects that either considered Creole as being of lower social status or which assign value to it based on political and national identity implications utterly influenced the language choices made in her literary works.

The idea of granting the audience its significant importance in the achievement of effective communication is also considered in Mary Lee's My Two Dads. This short story gives a narrative account of how a child became aware of the existing differences between the North American culture she had been exposed to all of her life and that from the country which her parents had come from, Korea. What she found curious about her father in particular was that he behaved differently in Korea and was able to easily get by in a context that was so different from the one she knew. The man not only spoke the language fluently, but also managed to communicate proficiently by embracing their customs and traditions and acting accordingly. Even though she had learned the rudiments of the language, she noticed that there was more to effective communication than just the acquisition of a few functional utterances. In agreement with this thought, I will point out that her father was not only bi-lingual, but actually bi-cultural. As the work's title explains, two dads, practically two different persons communicated differently to meet the ways of the addressees to utterly enable a better understanding of the intended message.