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Heroism exists in almost every culture. It represents people’s values and pursuits in society and promote social progress in some ways. The core of heroism lies in how to evaluate the social values for hero and how a person can become a hero in different cultures. As two examples of East and West, the heroism of China and America are an eloquent illustration of that. Chinese and American culture shape different heroic images according to their values especially in movies. This paper discusses the two kinds of heroism for their differences and explores the roots and cultural background for Chinese and American heroism.
This essay tries to take Iron Man and The Flowers of War as examples to contrast the differences of heroism between China and America. The series of Iron Man films are from a super hero image in Marvel Comics. From 2008 to 2013, three films of Iron Man play in the cinema, get good box-office and become one of the masterpieces in heroic films. For the other example, The Flowers of War is directed by the famous director Zhang Yimo. It describes a story that thirteen prostitutes step forward bravely to protect students in the Nanjing Massacre.
This paper is pided into five parts. Chapter one is the general introduction to the study. It presents the meaning of heroism and a brief introduction of the two movies. The second chapter is a literature review, which reviews the studies of former scholars. Chapter three discusses the similarities and differences heroic images between Iron Man and The Flowers of War. The fourth chapter first shows an authoritative definition and then it contrasts the differences of heroism between China and America and analyzes the reasons of the differences together with the fusion of heroism. Finally, chapter five conclude the whole thesis.
2 Literature Review
Heroes have been playing an important role in the progress and advance of human society, but heroism is performed by different manifestations. Different cultures have different explanations for heroism, therefore, there must be many differences in the manifestation of it. Many scholars have done researches about heroism in China and America.
In 2006, Lu Zaorong and Wang Xiu came up with a thought in their article Comparison of Heroism in Chinese and American Movies that the core of heroism was how to evaluate its social values and the cultural differences were what kind of person could be seen as a hero. In this essay, the similarities and differences of heroism in both American and Chinese movies were discussed in detail and the origins and cultural backgrounds of heroism in both cultures were analyzed, too.
In 2009, in his article Inpidualistic and Collectivistic Value Orientations of Chinese College Students——From the Perspective of East and West Culture Crossvergence Li Ping believed that China was regarded as a predominantly collectivistic or group-oriented country. But, with acceleration of modernization and exchange between eastern and western culture, influx of western inpidualistic value will undoubtedly exert influence on collectivistic value in China. This paper is designed to investigate status quo of value orientations held by students from the perspective of Western and Eastern cultural crossvergence.