Superman So Darned American Essay

In the essay What Makes Superman So Darned American by Gary Engle, Engle suggests the possibility that Superman is the epitome of being an American, even more so than actual Americans such as John Wayne, or fictional ones such as Paul Bunyan. Engle states that out of everyone in American history Superman is the only one that “achieves truly mythic stature, interweaving a pattern of beliefs, literary conventions, and cultural traditions of the

American people more powerfully and more accessibly than any other cultural symbol….” This is Engle’s thesis, he goes into more detail using those three aspects to explain why he believes that Superman perfectly represents America. He succeeds at it and he doesn’t at the same time.

At many points in his essay Engle

However, he doesn’t reference that in his thesis. He does talk about cultural traditions, which could be interpreted as talking about the fact that immigrants created/shaped America, but he goes off on a tangent that doesn’t really come back around to why it’s important that Superman is an immigrant. “As powerful a myth as the Western was, however, there were certain limits to its ability to speak directly to an increasingly common twentieth-century immigrant sensibility” (pg 3). This is just one example of Engle’s tirades concerning immigration in which he doesn’t mention Superman at all in this paragraph or the five paragraphs after it. If Engle kept bringing Superman back in, and explaining why Superman was relevant to the topic of that paragraph then it might have made more sense. Going off on tangents in an essay is okay, but not having a coherent thought process or point to revolve around, it falls flat. Usually when a child is asked who their favorite superhero the typical response is

Superman, and that was definitely the case for Engle. As he grew up he started to like him