【作者】 彭启贵；

【导师】 毛思慧；

【作者基本信息】 广东外语外贸大学 ， 外国语言学及应用语言学， 2008， 博士

【摘要】 情景喜剧是美国经久不衰、最受欢迎的电视节目之一。尽管如此，情景喜剧却没有受到评论界足够的重视。重悲剧轻喜剧的传统观念是导致评论家、学者对情景喜剧缺乏严肃认真研究的主要原因。我们认为，事实上情景喜剧与其他电视节目一样，弥漫着当代价值观念，同样具有反映、再现、重构美国社会现实与变革的潜质。在这一思想指导下，本论文试图探讨情景喜剧如何再现种族性，这一多民族的美国社会中最普遍而又最棘手的问题．基于以往对情景喜剧及族性的研究，本文着重研究九十年代美国情景喜剧中种族性的再现。本研究综合话语分析及符号学理论，定量分析与定性分析相结合，对九十年代一些最有影响的黑人情景喜剧、亚裔人情景喜剧、白人情景喜剧进行了深入的探讨。研究发现，与七、八十年代相比，九十年代的情景喜剧在再现种族性方面变化不大。白人无论在出现频率与人物形象方面都占统治地位。尽管黑人情景喜剧有迅速的增长，而其他有色人种的情景喜剧却仍然稀少甚至空缺。在再现少数族裔的人物与文化方面，九十年代情景喜剧出现了歧义、矛盾、对立等特点。为满足不断增长的少数民族观众的需求，电视网络推出了更多少数民族的情景喜剧，其中不乏正面的、多样的人物形象，然而人们所熟识的一些刻板形象仍然没有完全消失。在分析白人情景喜剧《宋飞正传》及《老友记》时，我们发现，在看似正面积极的少数族裔形象背后，仍隐藏着刻板化、他者化的痕迹。新型的种族主义仍然存在。在九十年代的情景喜剧中，这种种族主义主要以再现白人为中心、为主角、为标准，而将非白人再现为边缘、配角、异常的形象。作为对情景喜剧中种族性再现的多视角、跨学科探讨与批评，本论文从不同领域、各流派中获得理论支持。符号学、传统马克思主义、新马克思主义、福柯的知识—话语—权力学说、喜剧理论、后殖民研究、以及流行文化与电视理论等构成了本文的理论框架。其主要目的不仅是为了批判性地理解电视屏幕上的所示所现，还要批判性地理解这些意义的构成与解读过程。换言之，我们不仅要探寻、揭示九十年代情景喜剧中种族性再现的复杂性、多义性、以及矛盾对立的现象，还要深究更深层的力量与话语，如经济的、政治的、社会文化的、心理结构的力量因素，以及来自于电视台站、制作人、演员、观众与评论家的话语。所有这些力量与话语共同作用，不断地构成与重构，建构与解构、改变与维持着情景喜剧中种族性再现的版图。本文的结论是，九十年代情景喜剧中种族性再现是各种社会力量角逐的结果，是多种不同声音竞争话语权的产物。九十年代情景喜剧深深地打上了白人至上、父权为中心、资本主义的主流意识形态的烙印。情景喜剧是不同种族再现其存在、争夺其意义与快乐的空间、场所。更多还原

【Abstract】 Situation comedy, or sitcom, has been one of the most durable and most popular television genres in the United States of America. However, despite its longstanding popularity, sitcom has not received its due attention from the critical world. The traditional prejudice of valuing tragedy over comedy has impeded many critics and scholars from taking sitcoms seriously. In opposition to the conventional bias towards comedy, it is our conviction that sitcom, like any other television drama, is deeply inscribed with prevailing ideologies and is also equally capable of reflecting, representing, and reshaping the social changes in the United States.Equipped with this conviction, this study attempts to examine how American sitcoms represent ethnicity, one of the most pervasive and contending issues in the multi-ethnic American society. Built on the previous studies of sitcoms in relation to ethnicity, this study focuses on the representations of ethnicity in American sitcoms in the 1990s. By combining both discursive and semiotic analyses, complementing quantitative with qualitative methods, this study makes an original exploration of how ethnic groups are represented in some of the most influential and popular black, yellow and white sitcoms during this period. It is found that, compared with sitcoms in the 1970s and 1980s, the landscape of sitcom on American television in the 1990s changed but only within certain aspects in representing ethnicity. Whiteness continued to dominate the screen either in terms of appearance and /or character construction. "White and black" division continued to be the main feature of ethnic representations in sitcoms. While black sitcoms increased dramatically, the other colored sitcoms remained marginal or invisible. In terms of representing ethnic characters and their cultures and communities, ambiguities, ambivalences and contradictions permeated and characterized the sitcoms in the 1990s. In the study of the colored sitcoms, we found that while trying to produce more colored sitcoms with more positive and diversified images of colored people to counter the conventional stereotypes and satisfy the increasing minority audiences, the networks were found hard to discard the "tested and tried" familiar stereotypes. In the analysis of popular white sitcoms, namely, Seinfeld and Friends, it is found that underneath the seemingly positive portrayals of ethnic minorities still lie the traces of stereotyping and otherizing the people of color. New types of racism, mainly in the form of representing the whites as the center, the heroes and/or heroines, and the norm, but the colored people as the peripheral, the supporting and the deviant are found in the discourse of sitcom representations of ethnicity in the 1990s.As an interdisciplinary inquiry and critique of representations of ethnicity in sitcoms, this study draws on different schools of thoughts and critical discourses, such as semiotics, classical /neo Marxism, Foucauldian analysis of knowledge, discourse and power, theories of comedy, postcolonial studies and more recent studies on popular culture and television. A major objective of doing so is to understand critically not only what was shown and seen, but also how their meanings were actually constructed and interpreted. In other words, we not only try to explore and reveal the complexities, contradictions, ambiguities, ambivalences in the representations of ethnicity in sitcoms in the 1990s, we also try to probe the underlying contending forces and discourses, forces of economic, political, socio-cultural and psychological nature and discourses of the television networks, the producers, the performers, the audiences and the critics, that jointly form and reform, construct and deconstruct, transform and perpetuate the landscape of representations of ethnicity in sitcoms. It is our conclusion that representations of ethnicity in sitcoms in the 1990s were the results of the contestation and articulation of various social forces and voices in the American society; and sitcoms in the 1990s were deeply inscribed with the dominant ideology of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. Sitcoms serve as the site for different ethnic groups to represent their existence and contest for meaning and pleasure.更多还原