Notion myths et heros

Myths and heroes

I’m going to talk about the notion myths and heroes. First, I will explain what I understand by myths and heroes.

A myth can be defined as a story about gods or heroes, it can be a popular belief a tradition or a false notion. A hero can be mythological figure, a person who is admired for his or her achievements, a superhero or maybe a role model or an icon.

In order to illustrate this notion I have chose to talk about a famous American myth : the American dream and heroes that constitute it. We can ask ourselves : How real is the American dream ? To answer this question I will present four documents, two are songs the first is named « American Land » by Bruce Springsteen and the second is called « Punch Press Operator » from Pete Seeger. The third document is a cartoon named « an alien » by Joe Heller, to finish the last document is a American icon, the Bald Eagle.

First I am going to talk about the concept of the American dream and then I will demonstrate the real conditions of life in the USA.

First of all, I will define the American dream. It’s the ideals of freedom, equality and opportunity traditionally held to be available to every American. Everyone in the US has the chance to be successful and happy. People can start from scratch and become wealthy.For that matter, the US has many emblems representing this concept, I have chosen to present two of them. So the first is the Statue of Liberty represented in the cartoon « an alien ». It is from 2010, and the Statue has a broken chain on one of her feet, symbol of liberty. She represents the hope for a better world too. The second emblem is the Bald Eagle : it was chosen for its strength, courage, long useful lives and his majestic aspect. It is represented with leaves that reflect social peace. To illustrate this concept I have chosen the song « American Land ». This song is about the reasons of immigration in the US it is a story of a young man who emigrants to the US and it is dated from 2006. To begin with, people thing that it’s the land where people are on an equal footing and country is seen as a open society. There are no social classes, no social barriers, then people can become rich rather quickly. The term « a promised land » is constantly repeated, the songwriter talks about gold and diamonds too. Immigrants are attracted where better living condition seem to exist for everyone, hence they came with nothing and made their home. The American dream makes a positive image of the US. There is even a documentary named “American Dream” by Barbara Kopple dating from 1992. Nowadays, we talk a lot about the American way life : in fact fashion, tv series, cars and much more are envied by Europeans.

Although, with the hindsight and the media coverage we can wonder about this concept. What is going in real life ?

Second, I’ll talk about the real conditions of life in the USA. To begin with, immigrants and destitute people have built America in the hope of climb the social ladder, integrate society and have a better life. But in fact , it’s the opposite. In the song “American Land” we can see that workers man from all nationalities lived in dire straits, they have built the country with their hands . The words “they

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