Synthèse Myth and Heroes

MYTH AND HEROES

I am going to talk about the notion of Myths and Heroes. First of all I would like to give a definition of this notion. A hero is a person admired for his achievements, noble qualities and great courage. He can be fictional like Superman, or real like Martin Lutherking who fought for a cause his whole life for example. Someone who saves life can also be called a heroe like firefighters or policeman. My idea of an heroe is someone I can admire and someone who inspires other by accomplishing feats or extraordinary facts. A myth can be defined as a story about gods or heroes, it can be a popular belief, a tradition or a false notion. As humans, we can decide to believe it or not.

I have chosen to talk about these documents : The first one is an extract from the Telegraph written by Alice Thompson in 2005 untitled We, the British , the second one is a drawing about two typical British characters which are Alice in Wonderland and Robinson Crusoe, and finally I am going to talk about about the trailer of the British movie Johnny English.

Is Britishness a myth ?

In a first part, I will define the term Britishness, then in a second part, I will analyze how British characters represent a typical British person.

In We, the British , Alice Thompson, the author answers the question : « What does it mean to be British ? ». The idea of Britishness is explained in this text. We can say that Britishness is an amount of ideas and clichés about the way of life of British people. Indeed, to a lot of people, Britishness relates to the royal family and the Queen, double-decked buses, tea, bear and pubs, rain, junk food, well-mannered and very original people and lots of other clichés that we can see on numerous movies and series.

So the extract talks about everydaylife and attitudes of British people, the history of the country, and finally the British famous people. We learn that these clichés are rather true, such as bad food, the fact that British people are eccentric with humour, or going to pubs, keeping good care of their gardens, homes, children, pets, they are bad at cooking but good at making candies and playing cricket, they have a reputation for being always smart and they can finally dress outrageously. Even if the British are most of the time religious, they are really open-minded and tolerant : they don't judge each other. However, they are also really law-abiding citizens, as a tourist you have to stick to the rules like them or you can have problems. Besides, we can say that they keep calm in every circumstance especially thanks to their infallible sense of humor. As the author mentionned, they keep a « stiff upper lip ».

We also learn in the extract that Britishness is also about being proud of your country : The United Kingdom is a multicultural nation where the British brag about their story. They were one of the first nation with a constitution, the first to have an industrial revolution and they have « never lost a war », so they claim to be different from any other nation in the world.

To conclude, the clichés of Britishness are well confirmed and we saw that they have a diferent and interesting way of life and mentalities than in other country, as the history of their country. Famous people and characters are part of Britishness such as the Queen or James Bond. We can say

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