(BA) (4-year-programme) - The University of Hong Kong

40ENGL1022.Poetry past and present (6 credits)This course introduces students who have little experience of poetry to two of the most populargeneric forms in English poetry – the sonnet and the lyric. Selected examples will be from theseventeenth to twentieth centuries and will include poems by British, American, and anglophonewriters. A specific theme will be chosen as the focus for poems from different historical moments.Assessment: 100% coursework.ENGL1023.The view from nowhere: Experimental prose (6 credits)This course poses a theoretical question (what is literary prose?), and contemplates a variety ofanswers historically, by studying the flourishing prose genres of the English Renaissance. We beginwith an introduction to theories of prose, before proceeding to a wide range of literary works andhistorical documents: essays, explorers’ journals, science fiction, utopias, and picaresque novels. Thegenres that we examine are all experimental not only in the late modern sense of ‘attemptingsomething new,’ but also in the early modern sense of ‘relying on experience.’ But what sort ofexperience did writers consult to narrate trips to the moon and catalogue the customs of remotepeoples? Moreover, how is such storytelling (fictional or first-hand) supposed to affect the lives of itsreaders? Our central critical focus will be the importance of narrative perspective, or the speaker’s‘point of view,’ for determining what we, as readers, come to know.Assessment: 100% coursework.ENGL1024.Topics in world literature (6 credits)This course introduces students to the concept and practice of world literature. It seeks to understandworld literature not as a collection of national literary canons created in different linguistic andcultural locations, but as a field of knowledge about literature as a cross-cultural and translingualsystem of production and circulation. We’ll read a selection of seminal statements on world literatureand discuss the historical formation of world literature: its methodology and scope, its politics andlimitations, in close relation to historical forms and forces of globalization.Assessment: 100% coursework.ENGL1025.Understanding narratives (6 credits)This is a course about how stories work, and how to read them effectively and critically. Weencounter narratives every day, in gossip and jokes, news reports, in books and films and on theinternet. Everyone is experienced in understanding and interpreting stories. This course gives you thechance to articulate, understand, and develop your skills as a consumer (and creator) of stories,through describing and analyzing the various elements of a narrative – such as narration, character,structure, genre, and point of view – in a number of different examples in English. The course willdevelop a critical vocabulary which students working in small groups can use, with increasingconfidence, to discuss, analyze and report on written narrative texts of various length and complexity.Besides the target stories, there will be critical readings, with plenty of examples, in textual studiesand in narratology (the poetics of stories). At the end of the course, all students should have the skillsand confidence to give a productive and well-informed reading of any narrative, literary or nonliterary,and some sense of the part that narrative plays in our understanding of the world we live in.Assessment: 100% coursework.