1
Part I: Introduction
I.1. Rationale
I was born to a family whose members are all business people except me. My father used to be
a successful businessman who traveled all around the world from Asia, Europe, America to
Australia. After each trip, he told me about the places he had been to and about the people he
had met with vivid examples of their culture. From my father, I learnt about the beautiful
Singapore city and Copenhagen capital of Denmark whose people are very well aware of
keeping their city clean and green, about fast-food and the work-oriented and individualistic
people in California compared to the out-going and neighborly people in Texas, Louisiana and
Arkansas. My father has left in me the curiosity to learn about culture of the countries around
the world. Besides, my father and my brother were my first teachers of literature who blew in
me the wind of passion to study literature, moving my heart with the poem “Me om” by Tran
Dang Khoa, “Nguoi thay dau tien” translated from a Russian short story by a Russian writer,
“Chiec la cuoi cung“ translated from an American short story by O’Henry. These literary
works provoked in me the love for men, the understanding of the people, their culture and the
social circumstances in and about which the works were written.
I am now a teacher of English at Haiphong Foreign Language Center under Haiphong
University. For a teacher of English, having good knowledge of the culture and society of
English speaking countries is of great benefit since such experiences do help to make the
teaching and learning of the target language easier, more lively and vivid. It can not be denied
that the teaching and learning of a language would fail if the teacher does not have good
cultural and social background knowledge to explain to his or her students the situations in
which the native speakers use the language or the social circumstances in which the language
is used.
Once watching the “Sao mai diem hen” and “Bai hat Viet” competitions, the favorite music
tournaments of the Vietnamese on television, listening to most competitors singing all pop
songs, which originated from the United States, it came to my question that “To what extents
has American culture penetrated the Vietnamese?” Beside pop music, we can witness the
practice of American culture by a large number of people in our country, especially, by the
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cultural and social contexts in which the language is used. Thus, they could use the language
in a more natural way and, therefore, engage in language activities more actively.
I have always insisted that teaching literature in a foreign language is not for the sole aim, that
is to teach the language and the art of language to express the ideas, but it is for the greater
aim, that is to broaden the knowledge of the students of the target culture and society. With
such knowledge, my students would be more conscious of their cultural identity and practice
the target culture more selectively.
I.3. Scope of the research
Within the limitation of a minor thesis, I only discuss some of the most prominent aspects of
the culture and society of the mainstream American in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
such as individualism, American informality, racial discrimination, modern American women,
generation gap and American people in the turbulent ages. These are the features of American
culture and society that arise most prominently in the short stories I luckily came across.
The literary works used for analysis are the short stories written by recognized American
authors such as William Faulkner, Jesse Stuart, Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Bernard
Malamud, Grace Paley and the new generation of writers including Charles Bowden, Tom
McNeal, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bobbie Ann Mason, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Nathaniel Bellows,
Julia Alvarez, Akhil Sharma and others. Besides, I include one piece of memoir and a literary
essay which I find helpful to support my discussion.
I.4. Design and methodology
The paper is divided into three main parts:
Part I presents an overview of the whole research, providing readers with the rationale, the
aims and objectives, the scope, the design and methodology of the study.
Part II is the development of the paper, consisting of two chapters. Chapter 1 is devoted to the
literature review of the subject matter which deals with the concepts including culture and
society, literature, short stories and other genres of literature, techniques in storytelling, and
short literary works and their portrayal of culture and society. Besides, the first chapter also
provides an overview of American society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such
overview of American society, along with the theoretical background in the previous section
4

basketball Michael Jordan and the “golfing genius” Tiger Wood. These examples are to prove
that culture is not unfamiliar with us, but it is anything, both tangible and intangible, that we
have, we think and we do. As M. Thomas Inge and Dennis Hall pointed out in their book The
Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture, “Man’s culture is the complex of all he
knows, all he possesses, and all he does.” (2002, xix) “All he knows” can be his knowledge
and ideas of life, science and his explanation of the relationship among people, their customs,
religion or so. “All he possesses” includes all his material property, his family, his relationship
with other people, his belief and values, his personality as well as his talent. And “all he does”
is concerned with either his material or spiritual activities. In the same light, Michael Kammen
in his book “American culture, American tastes, social change and the 20
th
century” identifies
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culture as “the way of life of particular people living together in one place. That culture is
made visible in their arts, in their social system, in their habits and customs, in their
religion…” (1999, p.8) What Kammen meant by the “particular people living together in one
place” is what we call society. In Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, society is defined as
“people in general, living together in communities” or “a particular community of people who
share the same customs, laws, etc.” Such customs, laws and etc make up a culture. Culture and
society are closely related. We do not have two different societies with exactly the same
culture or one society with completely different culture. Let consider American society and
Vietnamese society. The two communities live in different parts of the world on different
continents. With different geographical features and history, each community develops their
economy in different ways, therefore, each country has a distinguished culture. With its origin
in water-rice agriculture, the culture of Vietnam is often regarded as community-based culture
whereas the American tend to develop their individualistic culture owing to their hunting, and
farming origin supported by developed industry. Within the American society, there are many
races such as white, black or African-American, American Indian or Alaska native, Asian,
native Hawaiian, other Pacific Islander and ethnic groups due to immigrations from all around
the world. However, when all these races live together in one united society, they share the

“True literature is not just there to entertain…it is there to help us understand ourselves and
the world in which we live that little bit better.” (2000, p. viii) As he suggested, a real literary
work does not only provide readers with pleasure but also helps to improve their critical
thinking of their own ways of life, their belief, their religion, which means their culture and
“the world in which ” they live in, which is the society . In the same light, Norman N. Holland
also stressed the roles of literature in providing readers with knowledge of the world and,
moreover, with approaches to their understanding that world. He insisted that “Literature is
not things but a way to comprehend things.” (as cited in Beaty, Booth, Hunter & Mays, 2002,
p. xxviii) What Holland meant by “things” here is everything in the world around us including
culture and society. Literature is not only concerned with problems of a culture and society but
also reveals how the writer deals with such problems. The writer approaches the subject
matters in one way and the reader may approach them in a different way but the thing is, the
8
writer brings about his experiences and views of life for the reader to expose to, to compare
with and to sharpen his owns.
II.1.2.2. Short stories, memoirs, essays and other genres of literature
The classification of literary genres or types of literature is often based on many categories
including theme, form, technique, tone, length and others. Regarding the form, literature is
traditionally divided into three main genres including prose, poetry and drama. Prose is
distinguished from the other genres in the way the ideas are organized in paragraphs made up
of complete sentences. Short story is a sub-genre of prose. Regarding the technique whether to
use real or imaginary materials, literature comprises of fiction and non-fiction As defined in
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, fiction is “a type of literature that describe
imaginary people and events, not real ones”. The characters and events are invented to
promote the writer’s point of view or ideology about life. However, there is still some real in
fiction. As I have said in the definition of literature, a piece of literary works is made up from
the “raw materials of life”. Therefore, there must be something true in the work. The
“something” here can be either the social context or the features of the characters which
resemble ones in the real life. This genre comprises short stories, novels, poetry, dramas and
others.

“vantage point” can be depicted from the first person stand (The first person is the
narrator named “I” or “me” that tells the story.) or the third person stand (The third
person can either be an omniscient narrator who knows everything that happens or a
limited narrator who is the outsider of the events and describes from the points of view
of one character in the story.)
- Theme is the message of the story that the author wants to send to readers. The
message is often about human behavior and relationship, human nature, conflicts in the
society and the solution and so on. The theme can be explicitly stated or implicitly
presented, which encourages readers to consider all the elements of the story in order
to infer the message.
- Plot is the sequences of related events which help conveying the theme and the point
of view. A plot is often developed in five stages: exposition, which provides
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introductory information for the setting, the characters and the conflict; rising action,
which develops and complicates the conflicts, which then leads to the climax – the
highest emotional or turning point of the story; falling action – the action that the
characters do after the climax, which brings about the resolution which deals with
how the conflicts are resolved.
Let consider an example with the short - short story “Snow” by Julia Alvarez, a recognized
Dominican - American fiction writer (as cited in Chin. et al, 2002, p. 1032)
As seen from the diagram, the climax is drawn from a number of rising actions and after the
climax come a falling action which perform a lead to the resolution, which indicates the theme
- the message the writer wishes to present to readers, that is the value of life, which should be
highly considered. The climax of this short story, which is the extreme anxiety of the young
immigrated girl when mistaking snow for bomb, was not only the suffering of a single
character in the story but of a number of real American people during the nuclear age in the
1960s. Although their characters, actions and dialogues can be invented, short stories often
portray real cultural and social subject matters.
“I” watched the
snow and found

flurry of
chark
marks to
illustrate
the dusty
fallout that
would kill
them
“I” shrieked
“Bomb!
Bomb!” seeing
the sky dotted
with snow
The
teacher
told “I”
that it is
snow, not
bomb
Exposition Rising actions Falling action
Climax
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II.1.2.2.2. Essays
As our common knowledge, essay, one of the most common types of non – fiction, is a short
piece of writing dealt with a chosen topic which can be of social or cultural issues, personal
conflicts and perception of the world, interpersonal relation and many other subjects.
There are two main kinds of essay: narrative and informative. Narrative essays are short
writings devoted to true stories told from either the first person or the third person point of
view. While a short story has to do with unreal people and things, a narrative essay focuses on
real people and events. However, in some essays, writer employs some imaginary and creative

Besides, a memoir, like an essay is often made up of three parts, introduction, body and
conclusion
II.1.2.3. Some techniques in storytelling
Technique is one of the five major elements of storytelling in association with plot, theme,
point of view, character and setting. Technique has to do with the structuring of the story into
the plot so that the writer can convey the theme and the manipulating of the language in order
to express the ideas of the writer in the most effective way. Hereby, I take into consideration
some of the most popular techniques which have been used so far:
- Flash-back or “replay” of scenes or events. As Beverly Ann Chin defines it, “Flash-
back is a portion of a story that interrupts the chronological sequences of events to
describe what happened earlier.” (Chin, et al., 2002, p. 813). This technique provides
readers with the background of a setting, an event or a character.
- Foreshadowing is considered opposite with flash-back as it “gives hints or clues that
suggest or prepare the reader for events that occur later in a work.” (Gordon &
Kuehner, 1999, p. 5). However, the writer must be careful when employing this
technique because too apparent hints or clues may result in boredom for the readers as
they can speculate exactly the ending of the story in early stages.
- Coincidence is the arrangement of time and place for two characters to meet or two
events to take place at the same time. As Gordon and Kuehner point out coincidence is
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“the chance occurrence of two things at the same time or place to denote the working
of Fate in a person’s life.” (Gordon & Kuehner, 1999, p. 6)
- Indirect characterization is a technique utilized to develop a character. The writer
does not present the personalities of the character in a direct way but readers can learn
what kind of personalities the character is through the words or actions of the character
himself or herself, or through what the narrator or the other characters say about him or
her.
- Foil is a character used to contrast with a second character in order to highlight the
qualities of the second character. (Chin, et al., 2002, p. 872) This is an effective
technique as it helps readers identify the main character more easily.

life she had experienced, Lahiri could never create such a recognized work which does not
only do the descriptive job but also provokes thoughts in readers as they may have their own
judgements about the modern lifestyle of the young American and, then, have the solutions for
their own problems which resemble those in the story.
For another instance, in her note for the short story “Accomplice”, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
writes “”Accomplice” grew out of my efforts to understand how a well-conceived assignment
managed to go awry. How could such involved, wordly, educated parents accept as real a
teacher’s report that was so obviously false? It was only by imagining Ms. Hempel’s
relationship with her father that I began to grasp what it might feel like, as a parent, to be the
only one who recognizes your child’s talent and greatness, and how hungrily you might
welcome the news that you are not alone ” (Bynum, as cited in Morre, 2004, p. 435) This
note is to show that a literary work is the fruit of the ponderation of the writer for the
understanding of different aspects of life. For Ms. Bynum, it was the ponderation of a teacher
herself finding a way to make a true school-report to the prideful parents as well as activate
the students in their study and their self-responsibilities by doing self-assessment. The story
reflects serious innermost conflicts of an individual school teacher, which many teachers of
the time might experience.
In whichever genre of literature either fiction or non-fiction, with whichever technique
employed, the sole aim of the writer is to portray real life, to express his or her own
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viewpoints of real life and to suggest a solution for problems in society. In each literary work,
the writer uses a particular technique which helps to achieve his or her ultimate purposes. For
example, as flash-back technique is employed in fictional A Rose for Emily with constant
shifts of past and present events, William Faulkner brings to readers the suspense in their
attempt to interpret the plot and, therefore, creates more curiosity and interest of the readers
when discovering changes in the attitude of the town people toward the protagonist, Miss
Emily as well as the changes in the South of the U.S where the story sets. Along with flash-
back, Faulkner also utilizes other techniques such as irony in his description of the women,
Miss Emily’s people and the other people in town, and, indirect characterization technique,
which employs the third limited narrator to present an objective voice for the story and

for Equality on August 26, 1970. The period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s was
also the time of Civil Right movement which ended with the equal rights for the African-
American in the whole country. The late 1960s and the first half of 1970s saw millions of
people march to protest the American wars in Vietnam in which 57,939 American soldiers
were killed or missed (as inscribed on Vietnam Veterants Memorial) (from
http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade80.html, retrieved on Dec 12, 2008). The 1980s was the
time of “I” generation who craved for their own status in the society marked by sex revolution.
Entertainment was booming with new genres of music such as rap or hip-hop, cable
televisions, MTV and so on. The following 1990s, though witnessing the U.S involvement in
the Gulf War, escalating terrorism, school shooting and sex scandals, the American enjoyed a
booming economy which led to low unemployment and flowering consumption. However the
beginning of the twenty-first century was welcomed by the American great anxiety and fear
after the suicide attack by the Islamic extremist’s organization named Al-Qaeda on the Twin
Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which caused 2,974 fatalities excluding
the 19 hijackers and billions of dollar for economic recovery (retrieved Mar 10, 2009 from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11,_2001_attacks). Along with the tense of terrorism,
the American, at the beginning of the twenty-first century once again have been suffering
another global economic recession with the unemployment rate reached to 8.1% in February
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2009, equivalent to 12.5 million people out of work. (retrieved on March 11, 2009 from
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.html)
Such mosaics of American culture and society provides a background for our understandings
of the more specific cultural and social aspects of the American in the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries later discussed in this research.
Chapter 2: some Aspects of American culture and society in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through short
literary works
II.2.1. American informality
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The American are very well-known for their informality. I remember seeing an American man

feeling that they are at home and, therefore, improve the closeness of the host and the guests.
Another variation of American informality is seen in the short story “The Magic Barrel” by
Bernard Malamud. The story, which takes place in the 1950s in New York, provides us with
an evidence of casuality in the way Salzman, a marriage broker, behaved as a guest at the
home of Leo Finkle, his customer and a rabbinical student when he came to Leo to persuade
him to consider some of the women he had introduced to him. While Leo behaved very
formally, asking Salzman to call him “Mr. Finkle.” (as cited in Chin. et al, 2002, p. 877),
Salzman, on the contrary, is very casual. He brought with him something to eat because he
was so hungry after “all day in a rush” (As cited in Chin. et al, 2002, p. 880) and ate in front
of Leo without offering him. “…first must come back my strength”, he said and “took out of
the leather case an oily paper bag, from which he extracted a hard, seeded roll and a small,
smoked fish. With a quick motion of his hand stripped the fish out of its skin and began
ravenously to chew.” (as cited in Chin. et al, 2002, p. 879-880). Salzman felt like home and he
made himself at home. Host and guest are friends so there is no need to conceal one’s hunger.
In Vietnamese situation, it is not common to bring food to other people’s house and enjoy the
food there. The Vietnamese often try not to tell the host that he or she is hungry for the
question of saving face. Only among those who are very close to each other such as among
close friends or relatives do people do so. However, for the American, it is quite normal for
the guest to say how he feels or what he wants to eat or drink. For example, when Salzman felt
for some tomato, or some tea, he asked Leo right away, though a bit hesitantly and humbly
due to the serious attitude Leo created “A sliced tomato you have maybe?” and “A glass tea
you got, rabbi?” (2002, p. 880). These evidences, though indicate rather extreme casualty for
the purpose of the author to draw a picture of a real awkward salesman, more or less reveal the
informality of the American as the guests. For an American, it is not uncommon to bring food
to other people’s house, especially to their friends’ for a party. And the thing they often bring
along is often a drink, such as beer, a bottle of champagne or wine or any of their favorite
drinks so that everyone can enjoy together. Like Kevin, a character in the short story
Nobody’s Business by Jhumpa Lahiri in The Best America Short Story 2002, when he came to
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his girlfriend’s house shared with other students, he often brought along beers and helped with

each train passed by and began to sing the song about “a train bound for glory””. While
singing the song, they felt a bright future ahead. Wright draws a lively picture with “A black
winged butterfly hovered at the water’s edge. A bee droned. From somewhere came the sweet
scent of honey suckles. Dimly they could hear sparrows twittering in the woods. They rolled
from side to side, letting sunshine dry their skin” (Schorer, p. 893). Unfortunately, the black
boys’ happy time did not last long until they were found naked by a white woman. In a normal
situation, the woman is supposed to be shy and run away. But the woman in Wright’s story
screamed panickly as if she was seeing four monsters. “You go away! You go away! I tell you
go away!” (Schorer, p. 894), she shouted even when Big Boy said very politely: “Lady, we
wanna git our closes.” (Schorer, p. 894) The climax of the whole story arises when the
woman’s fiancÐ appeared and immediately shot the four boys. Lester and Buck died. Bobo
was extremely terrified but Big Boy got the riffle and shot him to death. What the woman and
her fiancÐ did to the four innocent boys represents what the white did to the colored. The black
were treated like animals. They would be killed at any time, for any reasons. The more
extreme segregation is depicted in the barbarous punishment the white gave to Bobo, one of
the escaped. As Big Boy could see while he was running away from his hometown, the white
men burnt Bobo and “A black body flashed in the light. Bobo was struggling, twisting, they
were binding his arms and ligs.” Bobo’s arms and ligs were bound symbolizes the fate of the
black was bound. No matter they struggled, they would be killed. The injustice and barbarian
of the society of the time is shown in the death of the three black innocent boys and the
exhausting flee of Big Boy paid for the nonsensical fear of a white woman.
The severe segregation is also revealed in the memoir Prime Time by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
when he recalled the murder of the fourteen-year-old Emmette Till in August 1955 in
Mississippi after his friends dared him to ask out a white woman. “He whistled at some white
girl…that’s all he did. He was beat so bad that they didn’t want to open the casket.” (Gates, as
cited in Chin. et al, 2002, p. 1092). For the American and the world, the murder of Emmett
Till was an international issue. It is well-known that three days after Emmett Till whistled at
Carolyn Bryant, a store clerk, he was weighted down by a seventy-five pound cotton gin fan
22
tied around his neck with barbed wire by Carolyn’s husband and her half-brother. They

equality. This thirst is embedded in their excitement to see the shows on television such as
“the all-colored world of Amos and Andy” which is full of black lawyers, black doctors and
nurses. “We were starved for images of ourselves and searched TV to find them.” (p.1089) But
for other fields, the colored people were well-known for their sport ability. This is the reason
why the people in Piedmont, where Gates spent his childhood, kept track of every sport
programs which the colored played in. “We’d watch the games day and night, and listen on
radio to what we couldn’t see.” (p.1089) and “Colored, colored, on Channel Two.”
(p.1091)All these thirst and excitement to see their own images and success reveal the desire
of the colored people to be recognized in the society. They wanted to have the same stand and
to enjoy the same lives as the white. “With a show like Topper, I felt as if I was getting a
glimpse, at last, of the life that Mrs. Hudson, and Mrs. Thomas…must be leading in their big
mansions… Smoking jackets and cravats, spats and canes, elegant garden parties and
martinis… This was a world of so elegantly distant from ours, it was like a voyage to another
galaxy.” (p.1090) By then, all the advantages seen on television that the white came in for
seemed “just out of reach” of the colored in Piedmont in West Virginia. In the third part of the
memoir, Gates gives us lively facts of the Civil Rights movement, of the black children
integrated into Little Rock high school in Arkansas, of the soldiers from the National Guard
and the state police who surrounded these black children and how the people in Piedmont
reacted to the news. Nonetheless, all these facts were seen only on television. The people in
Piedmont still had to face with segregations.
While in Gates’s nonfiction, we learn about the cheerleaders, in the Civil Rights era, from all-
white high school with a big red C for “central” on their chest waved and cheered “Two, four,
six, eight – We don’t want to integrate.” (as cited in Chin, 2002, 1094), we know more
evidences of this offensive attitude in many other fictional works including Everything That
Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor. From the beginning to the end of the story, the
writer reveals her light irony when describing Julian’s mother and other passengers and their
hostile attitudes toward the Negro people in general and the Negro passengers on the bus.
Julian’s mother was so afraid to ride the buses alone at night because the buses at the time had
24
been integrated. Therefore, after looking up and down the bus and acknowledging that there

1920s flapper’s cloche
hat and bobbed hair
25
of States of America and most recently, the current 44
th
president of the United States Barack
Obama who has made a history in American presidency to be the first black to hold the office.
African American have gained recognizable stand in American society that they deserve.
II.2.3. Modern American women
From all the literary works I have had chances to read, I have the same feelings for the
American women, who share many things in common as very modern, practical, strong-
headed women who have new concepts of love, thirst for love and try their best to achieve true
love.
In the short story Watermelon Days selected in The Best American Short
Story 2002, Tom McNeal draws a picture of an American woman in the
late 1920s. Doreen Sulivan, a beautiful woman from Philadelphia, had
an appearance which was a fashion of the day with “a thin, sleeveless
dress over a light camisole, her bobbed hair was marceled into deep
horizontal waves, she wore a wide ribbon in her felt cloche… She also
used a scarlet lipstick to form her lips into a fresh cupid bow…”
(McNeal, as cited in Kenison and Miller, 2002, p. 211). The way
Doreen dressed up and wore make-up represents a revolutionary trend
of the rebellious American flappers in the so-called Jazz Age or the
Roaring Twenties. Traditionally, women wore long dress, long hair and very light make-up.
On the contrary, the rebellious flappers wore dresses which exposed their hands and legs down
from the knee. Their long hair was cut short and even bobbed. The year 1926, which the story
dates back to was a turning point in American fashion when camisoles, short dresses, bobbed
hair under cloche hats and heavy make-up were in their hey-day. What the flappers wanted
was to show themselves to be very young, modern, strong and different from traditional
American women of the time. Doreen, with her modern appearance raised the curiosity of the