| In the age of globalization,the cross-cultural communication of Hollywood movies has been accelerated.Since how cross-cultural audiences of Hollywood interpret the movies is very likely to reflect the extent of their acceptance,they deserve great academic attention.In China,Hollywood movies have high box office and a large number of audiences.Domestic studies on audiences’ interpretation of Hollywood movies mainly focus on animated movies and inspirational movies.Besides,most of the studies are general studies on Chinese audiences or Chinese college audiences,with little emphasis given to specific audiences like English majors,who are frequently exposed to American culture and Hollywood movies during their studies.Therefore,it may supplement and deepen the general studies to study English majors’ cross-cultural interpretation of Hollywood inspirational movies.In addition,it seems that the studies are inadequate in their discussion of why Hollywood movies attract audiences,because they focus more on the plots and less on the modes of images and scores.Based on Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding theory and multimodal discourse analysis,the study aims to answer the following questions: What is the current situation of the acceptance of Hollywood movies among English majors? Why is The Pursuit of Happyness acceptable to them?What are English majors’ positions when interpreting the American values in The Pursuit of Happyness? Why do they hold such positions?The research instruments used in the study include two rounds of questionnaires and an interview.The research participants are some English freshmen,sophomores,and juniors at a university in Shandong province.The first questionnaire is a preliminary one used to study the current situation of the acceptance of Hollywood movies among the students.The second questionnaire is used to study their cross-cultural positions when interpreting American values in The Pursuit of Happyness,namely,dominant-hegemonic position,negotiated position and oppositional position.Based on the results of two questionnaires,the interview is conducted individually to study interviewees’ reasons for accepting the movie and their interpretation positions.The study has the following major findings.When it comes to the first question,Hollywood movies are widely spread among English majors,and most of them hold positive attitudes towards the movies.Inspirational movies are ranked second in popularity,after love movies.The Pursuit of Happyness is one of the most popular inspirational movies among the students.As a classic inspirational movie rich in American values,The Pursuit of Happyness is accepted by English majors for four main reasons.First,they accept it because they are inspired by the protagonist’s mindset of self-making and spirit of optimism,and moved by the touching fatherson relationship.Second,their acceptance comes from the movies’ authentic English and cultural connotation that meet their needs for learning English language and American culture.Third,the acceptance is attributed to the technically well-made and highly harmonious images and scores that facilitate the theme of the movie and offer the audiences a pleasant viewing experience.Last,the acceptance is the result of the excellent acting skills of the father and the son that enhance the appeal of the movie.When it comes to the second question,English majors generally hold a dominant-hegemonic position when interpreting American value of equality in the movie,and negotiated positions when interpreting the six American values of “American Dream”,freedom,individualism,materialism,efficiency and competition.It is noteworthy that although they generally hold a dominant hegemonic interpretation position on the value of equality itself,they do not agree with the practice of the value in American society.In general,what are behind their positions are twofold.One is their agreement with positive things and their disagreement with negative things.The other is the role of socialist core values which guarantee their selective acceptance of the American values in the movie.In addition,the study happens to find that some English majors have unconscious cultural misreading of the American value of individualism.Focusing on English majors,the study examines their cross-cultural interpretation of the Hollywood inspirational movie titled The Pursuit of Happyness.It sheds light on the current situation of English majors’ interpretation of Hollywood inspirational movies and enriches the existing audience studies of Hollywood movies. |
