American Family Teleplays Comparative Study

This article is the systematic study which carries on between the Chinese and American family-theme TV drama. The author believes that according to the real condition that Chinese family-theme play develops nowadays, through the comparison with the American family-theme drama, profits from the mature American family-theme soap opera's artistic creation experience, combs the family-theme play in China's production and development process, and analyzes its esthetic special characteristic theoretically, discusses the influence and restriction to its development from the perspective of culture, social, the medium environment and the audience psychology, proposes corresponding cultural and artistic developing strategy, it has strong practical significance and theoretical value.This article attempts to analyze Chinese family-theme drama and American family-theme play rationally and academically. In the article, the author mainly compares the different selections of subject matter, means of artistic expression and its different aesthetic styles between Chinese family-theme play and American family-theme play. The article can be divided into following several parts:The first chapter is the starting point of the article. In this chapter, the author summarizes the development course of Chinese family-theme play and American family-theme play, which take much convenience to the later comparison.In second chapter, the author mainly discusses the backgrounds of the two countries' family-theme works of art, including different living environments, cultural tradition and TV running systems.The Third chapter and the fourth chapter are main body parts of the article. With the use of narrates theory, the third chapter focuses on three levels of narrates theory——deep structure, surface structure and dominant structure. In this chapter, the author compares with the cultural keynote originated from the narrative theory of the Chinese-American family-theme play, the relations between characteristics as well as the impacts to narrative forms caused by different narrative images and perspectives. In the fourth chapter, with the use of aesthetics, the author mainly compares the epic and meanings between Chinese family-theme play and American family-theme play.