Bachelor of Arts (BA) - The University of Hong Kong

102
AMER2028.
American media: the entertainment economy (6 credits)
(This course is also offered to non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadening purposes.)
The United States exerts significant global influence, in part because of its success in marketing
itself, both domestically and abroad, through media and entertainment. While many contest the
economic might, content, or perspective of various genres of American media, few are exempt from
its impact. This course will explore how America’s unique origins gave rise to a media-machine
that reaches into every facet of American life and into the lives of people around the world. It will
also look at its relation to technology and politics.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
AMER2032.
The American Hardboiled: From crime fiction to social document (6 credits)
(This course is also offered to non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadening purposes.)
Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, James Caan, Jack Nicholson... they all played him: the tired
gumshoe, the hired dick, the hardboiled detective, the gun for hire, the private eye. If you've seen
them in action and liked what you saw, now is your chance to study the originals. In this course we
will read and analyze some of the classic works of the genre which at various points has been
labelled hardboiled fiction, tough guy fiction, or even noir. We will begin with a socio-economic
look at the several decades in American history crucial to the development of modern crime,
crime-fighting forces and crime fiction. Combining data from demographics, history, sociology,
economics, urban studies, criminology, forensics and jurisprudence, we will lay the foundations for
a better understanding of the novels and films in the course and the social issues they touch on.
Building on these foundational lectures, will trace the rise of the hardboiled genre from pulp fictions
of the 1920s, the emergence of the classic hero and heroine (the private eye and the femme fatale),
the subsequent incarnations of the genre-including its contemporary offshoot, the police
procedural-and-the ways in which highbrow writers adapted the hardboiled novel to their own
purposes. We will attempt to map out what is specific and recurrent about hardboiled fiction in
terms of its structure and poetics, and try to define their role in American culture and beyond.
Towards the end of the course we may address a broader question of the relation between popular
and canonical literature in sociological and aesthetic terms.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
Third Year
AMER3001.
Institutions in American life: home, school, work, and play, Part I (to be taken
in third year) (6 credits)
(This course is normally open only to third-year students and is also offered to non-BA students for
inter-Faculty broadening purposes.)
Whether at home, at school, at work or at play, institutions of various kinds structure the lives of all
Americans. While institutions can be thought of in terms of discreet organizations - Harvard
University, the New York Stock Exchange, the American Medical Association, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art - or even the buildings in which these organizations are housed, in the broader, more
abstract sense, institutions are the forms into which social activity is organized. Among the most
fundamental institutions of this latter type, and the ones upon which this course will focus, are the
family, school, business and the professions, and leisure. Each of these institutions is associated
with values, beliefs and practices which, taken together, help to constitute American culture.
Following a chronological approach beginning with the early 19th century and continuing through to
the present, the course will examine these four types of institution in order to understand the origins
of the values, beliefs and practices which they embody, how these values, beliefs and practices may
have been impacted by such factors as gender, race, class, religion, ethnicity, and geographic region,