When an educator was invited by a Chinese university to teach a seminar in American drama, she used "family drama" as the organizing theme of her course because she was (and is) convinced that from Eugene O'Neill on, American playwrights have been obsessed with family disintegration and the failure of family harmony. This paper is an…

An American instructor taught a 5-week course on the family in American drama to a group of graduate English majors on the campus of Hebei Teachers' University in the People's Republic of China. The instructor learned as much about Chinese culture as the students learned about American culture. Lecture is the standard pedagogy even in graduate…