Notion d'anglais - Myths and heroes

Sujet du devoir

Bonjour,
Je suis en classe de terminale S et je passe mon oral d'anglais la semaine prochaine et j'aurais besoin d'une petite correction et de vos avis sur mon travail. Je précise que tout n'est pas entièrement rédigé mais il s'agit d'un plan très détaillé où presque tout est rédigé.
Merci d'avance pour votre aide.

Où j'en suis dans mon devoir

I’m going to talk about the notion myths and heroes and especially about the notion of myths. First of all, I would give a definition of a myth: a myth is a story that may or may not be true, it can be a popular belief, a tradition or a false notion. All cultures have myths which have been developed over time. To illustrate this notion, I will talk about the 60’s. The 60’s are considered as an era with a new climate of society. Indeed, it’s a period of important changes, of progress and of a change of mentality. This period is often seen positively. However, some people think that it’s also an era with a lot of negative aspects, in this way the fact to say that 60’s’ are only years of progress is a myth.

Why is the 60’s a myth? In first place, I will talk about the changes and the revolutions which took place in the 60’s, and finally, I will talk about the negative aspects of the 60’s.

I.                   Changes, progress, revolutions

An article of the website marketingmagazine.co.uk talk about the changes in the 60’s in different domains:

-          Technologic revolution: 1st man to step on the moon in 1969, televisions, new cars…

-          Fashion’s changes: London is the capital of fashion. The young generation enjoyed their freedom by partying hard and experimenting wild clothes.

-          Sexual revolution: contraceptive pill, breaking of taboos.

-          New musical wave: beginning of pop-rock music with the arrival of famous bands and singers like The Beatles, the Rolling Stone, Twiggy, Mary who made London the fashion capital of the world. There is also the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969.

Hippie movement: born in the US, it’s a movement mostly of young people which are baby-boomers, the hippies rejected the traditional values, the way of life of their parents' generation and the consumer society. They wants to experiments new things, especially illegal things like drugs…

It was a pacifist movement, hippies were against wars and wanted peace: in a song called Universal Soldier, the singer Donovan denounces the absurdity of wars, he asserts it is no use fighting, he thinks that soldiers are to be blamed for killing people, they made responsible for his actions.

II.                The negative aspects

Some people considered and still consider this period as a golden age, which is wrong. Consequently, people tends to exaggerate facts, to glorify this period too much, in this way they create myths and they forgot the negative aspects.

-          To give an example, I will talk about an extract of a film called Made in Dagenham, directed by William Ivory and where the action took place in 1968. The extract deals with a woman, Rita, an employer in the Ford car factory, who wants an equal pay, at that time, a woman was much underpaid in comparison to a man. She talks about her application to Mrs. Castle, the Secretary of State for Employment, who told her to be patient. But Rita wants to convince Mrs. Castle that the women deserves the equal pay for an equal work, and that they have to fight right now to get their right. The extract shows that in the 60’s, women don’t have yet many rights in comparison to a man, it was still a man’s world.

-          But the 60’s was a myth to the extent that it was the beginning of a decade of a reversal of values which causes many negative impacts and we can still see the repercussions today. Indeed, according to the report “Why I hate the 60’s”, the 60’s was the beginning of the consumer society, the big companies encouraged people to buy and to consume through the advertisement, and consequently it was the beginning of waste, pollution… It was also a terrible era for the British architecture, the architects used to build very high apartment blocks which were very ugly and they destroyed many Victorian houses to make place.  Moreover, the sex liberation during the 60’s was so excessive that 500 to 600 women abort every single day.  Finally, through the hippie movement, it was the beginning of destruction of many established values, consequently, hippie’s revolts have upset social order. According to this report, hippies lived in illusion through the drugs, they “played god” wanting to overthrow values and to satisfy their immediate pleasure instead to think about their future.

To conclude, the sixties were really a decade of progress and changes, but changes were not always positive. The 60’s were built on many myths, the 60’s caused many negative changes like the consumer society, the reversal of social order, and we can still see the repercussions of this changes on our society today.