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

954) Thoughts and emotions regarding freedom, happiness, love, and community in everyday life.Students must complete viewing the assigned films in a group or on their own.Note: This is a survey course which students can take in the second, third, or fourth year.Assessment: 100% coursework.CLIT2075.Modern poetry: Hong Kong and beyond (6 credits)This course will examine the relationship between poetry and culture, exploring how culture isinternalized, enacted, and resisted in the realm of poetry. We will situate the questions of ideology,subjectivity, resistance within the historical and cultural framework of world literature with a specificfocus on Hong Kong and Greater China. The dynamics of a constantly reshaped connection betweenknowledge, sensation, language, and the social contexts of poetry will be closely examined. Thiscourse will focus on some of the recurrent themes of Chinese and Western poetry, includingtemporality and spatiality, visibility and invisibility, the notion of the city, etc. We will trace themoments when Europe and America defined themselves as modern as well as the development ofmodern Chinese poetry, considering not only the internal dynamics of the poems we read but alsotheir implications in the (post)modern world.Prerequisite: CLIT1008 or CLIT1010 or with the consent of the teacherNote: This is a survey course which students can take in the second, third, or fourth year.Assessment: 100% coursework.CLIT2076.Fashioning femininities (6 credits)In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir states: “One is not born, but rather becomes awoman.” In this course, we will use this statement as a starting point to examine a number oftheoretical and historical issues in gender studies: What is the relationship between sex and gender? Issex a “biological given” and gender a “socio-cultural construct”? What is the role of the body inrelation to sex and gender identities? How are these identities formed? How have these issues evolvedin different societies at different periods? We will investigate these questions using as case studyrepresentations of femininities as found in a diverse range of texts such as philosophical treaties,medical writings, guidebooks for young girls and women, paintings, women's magazines, and fashionadvertisings.Note: This is a survey course which students can take in the second, third, or fourth year.Assessment: 100% coursework.CLIT2083.Film art, language and culture (6 credits)This course examines key ways of analyzing film art and culture. How films create meaning and howviewers make sense of the cinema frame this exploration of film as visual language and cultural textin the context of global cultures. The course places emphasis on learning basic film terminology andthe rudiments of film form. Critical discourses are also introduced to help students understandcultural issues such as identity, gender, history, and globalization. The student becomes acquaintedwith classical Hollywood cinema, other national cinemas, transnational cinemas, counter-cinemas, aswell as hybrid, experimental and documentary film modes. At the conclusion of the course, thestudent should be able to look at motion pictures critically, understand films as formal constructs, andplace films within broader institutional, economic, ideological, and cultural contexts.Note: This is a survey course which students can take in the second, third, or fourth year.Assessment: 100% coursework.