By Barbara Kingslover's 'Superman And Me'

Barbara Kingsolver’s essay “Stone Soup” is about how a family should be like. The ideal family has a mother, father, sister and a junior. Kingsolver writes how she thought her family would be perfect. She says that people assume that children with divorced parents are unhappy. Single parents, gay parents, and remarried parents are not the ideal family but that is ok.

In Stone Soup, by Barbara Kingsolver, Kingsolver argues that “any family is a big empty pot” and it does not matter what the family consists of because no family is the same (403). She employs her own personal experience and gives examples of how the shape of families has changed over time.

Family. What do you picture? Two married parents, their son and daughter, and maybe a dog, all living in a two story house in a nice suburban neighborhood. And who should blame you for picturing that? It’s been drilled into our minds all throughout our childhoods. Through our families, the tv, the books we read. But is this really all true? 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce and of that 50 percent, 46 percent are families. So why is this “perfect” family ideal so widespread? Author Barbara Kingsolver tries to explain this in her essay: ‘Stone Soup’. She claims it’s because society is so traditional and primitive in the way we idealize what a family is supposed to be: two married parents and their children. But that’s not really the case anymore. The main idea of her essay is that the definition of family needs to be reimagined to define more of what a family means, rather than what its terminology implies.

The essay starts with a very simple definition of a family, accompanied by an explanation of the relationship between family structure and the strength of the link between different people forming the family in question. The introduction has been put in a simple language to provide a fluid understanding of what the reader should expect throughout the text. Literal tools like proverbs and similes have been applied. There is a clear language connection of cultural legacy and a family unit where the authors explain that legacy in the society does not determine how different ethnicities connect with the family unit. Gertsel and Sarkasian believe that deliberations made on family responsibilities tend to pay more attention to nuclear family as opposed to the general family unit. The language used here implies that the general meaning of extended family unit is ignored or in some cases misrepresented.

A family consists of people with mutual respect, love, and passions for one another, conveys Barbara Kingsolver in her essay called the “Stone Soup”. She believes that a family isn’t necessarily bound by traditional concepts of happy marriages, rather she insists that this is a relatively new ideal in our society. A nuclear family is a representation of normal families; Kingsolver disagrees with this concept, and understands that today's norm are the non traditional families of the world. She writes this essay reminding non traditional families that there is nothing they need be ashamed of, ascertaining the parents that their families are complete

“I am smart. I am arrogant. I am lucky.” Wise words from a Spokane Indian boy named Sherman Alexie, who was not provided the same educational rights and opportunities as most Americans. He was born in Washington state on a Spokane reservation. People expected him to be dumb just because he was an Indian. Well that wasn't the case. He refused to be the stereotype Indian that society labeled him as. So at the age of three he taught himself how to read and write by analyzing a superman comic book. He faced tons of difficulties when trying to get his education. Difficulties such as teachers on the reservation refusing to teach him at the level he could learn at. Alexie was persuasive when informing his target audience that Indians should

Times have changed; the nuclear family is no longer the American ideal because family needs have changed since the 1950's. This American convention of a mother and father and their two children, were a template of films and early television as a depiction of the American family life. Now seen as archaic and cliché by today’s standards, but the idea is common throughout many of the first world nations in the world. This ideal was a vast departure from the past agrarian and pre industrial families, and was modeled and structured as the ‘American dream’ father working, mother maintaining the household and children molded to be simulacra of the parents. This portrayal was not the standard; many communities throughout America had a different

Everyone has a family of some kind. It may be the parents and siblings they were born with, or it could be the gang of six biologically unrelated elite drivers with an affinity for robbing banks at high speeds from Fast and the Furious. Ultimately, family is what people make of it, and it can be the ‘traditional’ two parents, one brother, one sister, and a dog named Spot, or it could be a woman and the kid she was left with. The term ‘traditional family' refers to the socially expected behaviors of each given role (for example, a mother taking her kid to the doctor,) in the family. Members of a traditional family in this case are either maritally or biologically related. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees has many characters who would consider themselves, or be considered, part of different families. The Bean Trees addresses and deals with the fact that nontraditional families can be just as strong as what society has defined as a ‘traditional’ family.

The heading of sherman Alexie article “Superman and Me” was the main reason I showed interest in the article in the first place. I have a strong interest for superheros so when I saw that Superman was involved I was naturally curious. Sherman tells the story of how he learned to read by trying to read a superman comic book. He does not remember the book in detail, but he does remember one scene where Superman is breaking down a door and Sherman would try to read the book by saying what was happening in the panel. When i read he was from an Indian Reservation I automatically knew that he had faced hardships since he was little, as he exclaimed that his people were expected to be intelligent and stay quiet. Sherman although was determined to

American novelist, Barbara Kingsolver, in her excerpt, “Stone Soup”, taken from, High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never, recounts the outrageous view that society has on divorced families/homes. Kingsolver’s purpose is to impress upon readers that it is okay for families to stem away from the traditional, “Dad, Mom, Sis, Junior”, family. She creates a persuasive tone in order to get rid of stereotypes and judgments of marital issues held by her readers and society. Through the effective use of anecdotes, appeals, and passionate diction, Kingsolver establishes her claim that blended families can get through life happy and perfectly fine by themselves or with close friends and family.

In the text, “Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie, the author talks about his opinion that knowledge is a power that saves our lives in many different ways by talking about his own experience with knowledge and how it impacted his life. Alexie expresses throughout the story how reading helped him learn and how he realized that he saved himself from reaching the expectations of failure set in front of him. Alexie then explains how he wants to introduce, to other Indians kids that are in the shoes of development he was once in, how to choose the route of knowledge in life like he did, so they don’t end up in failure. To sum up Alexie’s argument, “Superman and Me" explains how he believes everyone shouldn’t neglect knowledge, but accept it

Kingsolver is a divorced  woman and understands what society means by the phrase “a broken home”. She believes that having  an extended family or divorced family opens up a door that leads to new things in the family. She uses  the tale called “Stone Soup” to talk about how having a family is like having “a big empty  pot”(Kingsolver 152) and about how when one adds new things to the pot it can lead to a happy family.  Kingsolver uses the first person point of view to let the reader have a more personal connection  to the essay. She allows the reader to know what she thinks and how she feels. She writes, “ I dare  anybody to call this a broken home” (Kingsolver 147). The reader knows how emotional she is about  the subject of broken homes. Also, the tone of the essay seems to be a hostile towards anyone who  says that the family is a broken home. The diction of the essay uses both conversational and formal  language to connect with and inform the reader. She uses words like “blended families” (Kingsolver  148) to introduce the reader to different family labels. She uses phrases like “bless their hearts”  (Kingsolver 149) to be more conversational and motherly. Kingsolver uses anecdotes and imagery to  help solidify her ideas. She remembers Andy’s soccer game and how the cheering family brings to life  what a real family is.  Kingsolver tries to persuade the reader that

The second book I chose to read (151 pages) and do a report on was the “Intentional Family”. Doherty begins his book by telling the reader that this century has witnessed a revolution in the structures and expectations of family life. He states that we have reinvented family life away from the traditional family, or how he terms it, the “Institutional Family,” a family based on kinship, children, community ties, economics and the father’s authority. Children are now growing up in single-parent homes or living with a step-family, and an adult is likely to cohabitate, marry, divorce and remarry. The Institutional Family was suited to a world of family farms, small family businesses and tight communities bound together by a common religion. It began to give way during the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, when individual freedom and the pursuit of personal happiness and achievement began to be more important than kinship obligations, and when small farms and villages started to give way to more impersonal cities. A new family began to emerge – the “Psychological Family” – replacing the Institutional Family of the past. This new kind of family was based on personal achievement and happiness more than on family obligations and tight community bonds. Doherty believes that in the early twentieth century, Americans turned a corner in family life, never to go back.

In this paper, I will use the sociological imagination to connect my personal experiences of growing up in a nuclear family to comparison of growing up in a divorced family. I’m from a nuclear family and my best friend is from a divorced family. “Some people still think the average American family consists of a husband who works in paid employment and a wife who looks after the home, living together with their children” according to Giddens, Anthony pg. 447. That’s not the case in many households. There are many differences, from values, financial issues, and how having one parent opposed to, two parents growing up. Growing up in a nuclear family household has given me the opportunity to have both parents supporting me and always being there, having both parents at special events, giving me the guidance from both perspectives man, and women, love, and financial aid. My best friends parents have been divorced for over 19 years, her living style is much different. She has to make certain days available to visit her father, and her mother has financial difficulties.

For most of us, the family is considered as a well-known and comfortable institution. The perfect model of the ‘ideal’ family is still mostly considered to be consisted from two different sexes’ parents, and one or more children. Until quite recently, the sociology of the family was mostly functionalist and just in the last few decades has been challenged from various directions.