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

68influences in the adaptation of literature. This course also allows students to think creatively aboutstoryboards and visual techniques, by sketching alternative scenarios.Assessment: 100% coursework.ENGL1027.Analyzing discourse (6 credits)This course provides an introduction to the field of discourse, focusing on the analysis of spoken andwritten English. In this course, we will focus on exploring different approaches to the study ofdiscourse, developing tools for analyzing particular texts, and understanding the relationship betweendiscourse contexts and functions. Emphasis will be placed on data analysis in the course, which willgive students the opportunity to apply concepts from the lectures to workshop discussions andassignments. Some units to be covered in the course include: narrative structure, rhetorical analysis,spoken versus written discourse, data collection and transcription, conversation analysis, anddiscourse in professional contexts.Assessment: 100% coursework.ENGL1028.Awakenings: Exploring women’s writing (6 credits)This course will focus on close reading of passages from a selection of prose and poetry authored bywomen. As we read these texts, we will explore a few of the key issues that have concerned womenwriters. We will examine questions of the difference of the female point of view, the suppression offemale subjectivity and autonomy as well as the renderings of an alternative worldview and culture.Assessment: 100% coursework.ENGL1029.Drama: Comedy and renewal (6 credits)In this course we will look at intercultural drama through the lens of renewal and comedy. Topics tobe addressed include cross-cultural practices and theory of drama; dramatic representations of rigidityand renewal; development of character in cross-cultural stagings; oral and ritual origins of drama;humor and comedy. The course engages students in critical and creative perspectives: as readers, aswriters, as voluntary participants in short original pieces, and as researchers on comedy and renewalin popular and literary settings.Assessment: 100% coursework.ENGL1030.Dramatic changes: Versions of Renaissance literature (6 credits)In this course we will read great plays of the English Renaissance in tandem with their non-dramaticsources (history, romance, chapbook, story cycle). In a couple of instances, the plays themselves willbe considered as sources for contemporary representations (Hamlet for Stoppard’s spinoff,Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and Macbeth for Kurosawa’s film, Throne of Blood). ForRenaissance speakers the word ‘version’ principally meant a ‘translation’ from one language intoanother. We will observe and evaluate, therefore, what happens when a well-known or ‘true’ storygets ‘translated’ into the conventions and genres of the theater. We compare notable variations in thetelling of the tales, with attention to the following questions: How does the alteration of a plot elementchange a story’s significance? How does the manner of presentation — the enactment of drama(mimesis) or the narration of prose (diegesis) — affect the way we understand characters?Assessment: 100% coursework.