Constructing Social Allegories: A Comparative Study Of Twelve Angry Men And Its Chinese Adaptation

Twelve Angry Men(1957)successfully combined law,literature,and drama in the form of a film.This paper compares Twelve Angry Men with its Chinese adaption Twelve Citizens,focusing on crime narrative,legal narrative and national community,and discusses different social issues,national desire,citizenship,and ideologies.Furthermore,it argues that both films present individual legal disputes as allegories of “imagined communities” in different forms.There are five chapters in this thesis.Chapter One introduces research significance,theoretical framework,and methodology.Chapter Two starts from murder case,analyzing class identities of two suspects,as well as the distinct patricide theme under different ethical backgrounds.Chapter Three begins with the trail process,probing into social identities of jurors,symbolizations of courtrooms,and relationships between government and groups.Chapter Four pays more attention to America’s and China’s community constructions,pointing out that two films have proposed different solutions to the aforementioned social problems,and gives supplementary explanations for Anderson’s imagined community.Chapter Five provides the summary of the thesis.