The Study Of American National Image In The U.S.TV Series Shown In China

Nowadays, the role of mass media in shaping the national image is self-evident. With the frequent global cultural exchanges, enhancing the country’s soft power has been on the agenda. Due to its audio-visual oneness of presence and entertaining, TV plays has become the best hidden cultural output media. American TV series has experienced a developmental process from the TV screen to the internet in China. To most of Chinese audience who have no chance to personally visit the United States, US TV series is a window to know American daily life as well as meet the psychological demands of American multi-cultures.Drawing on the experience of language semiotics and film semiotics, this paper tries to use the method of semiotics to explore implicated American culture and its ideology. By means of the signifier and the signified of the film image, syntagmatic and paradigmatic of the film plot, this paper aims to find the denotation and connotation in the American series, and then parse out the hidden "myth" of the United States. At the same time, by encoding of US TV dramas and decoding of the audience, the study tries to perceive the significance of TV plays in shaping U.S. national image.This research chooses representative works of politics, family and affection of US TV series, attempts to discover the hidden national image from various perspectives. From these different types of drama, the research tries to present the American political and economic images, family and society images, cultural and religious images.