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

120CLIT2022.Reading the nineteenth-century: reaction and modernity (6 credits)This is the second of two courses reading texts from the nineteenth-century. Fastening on the three'masters of suspicion' in the nineteenth-century - Marx, Nietzsche, Freud - it reads the triumph ofrealism and of bourgeois culture, and examines ways in which this culture was critiqued. Teaching willlook at literary texts drawn from European cultures - Russia, France, Germany, Britain, and America.CLIT2023.Heterologies: the discourse of the other (6 credits)'Heterology' is 'the science of what is completely other'. It, and the course, looks at a range of ways inwhich the 'other' appears in literary texts - as the colonial savage, as mad, as mystic, as criminal, assexually deviant, or in relation to fascism.CLIT2024.Reading comedy: Dante and Boccaccio (6 credits)There are two texts derived from the Italian Renaissance to be used for this course: Dante's Comedy,which divides into three - Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, and Boccaccio's Decameron. These arecrucially important and formative texts, the second a response to the first, which deserve re-readingboth in order to confront texts of the past, and in the light of contemporary theoretical approaches fromnew historicism, from feminism, from work on the body and on sexuality and the city. We will examinethe new forms of narrative that emerged with the urban and bourgeois culture of fourteenth-centuryFlorence, with its new attention to the subject as individual and as communal. Above all, we will beconsidering what is meant by 'comedy' and why both Dante and Boccaccio work within its terms.CLIT2025.Visual cultures (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)It has often been said that ours is pre-eminently a culture of the visual, a 'Society of the Spectacle'. Thiscourse introduces students to one of the key developments in cultural theory today: a study of howvisual cultures are formed, and how they inform the ways we see, feel and think. There is indeed 'anoptical unconscious' made up of the criss-crossings of desire, ideology and reproductive technologies(or Freud, Marx and SONY), which manifests itself from ephemeral fashions to the permanencies ofarchitecture. What the course will focus on, however, are specific examples of changes and innovationsin visual culture found in art, photography, cinema, architecture, video, and urban life; and in particular,all the examples of visual material that problematize visuality. We will also attempt to draw out theimplications of such problematic visualities for critical and cultural theory.CLIT2026.Digital culture and new media technologies I (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)This course examines the interactions between contemporary critical and cultural theory and digitalculture. We will discuss theoretical and compositional approaches in the work of international newmedia artists (via World Wide Web, CD-ROM, video, exhibition and slide formats as available), andcreate new media projects ourselves, in order to expose possible modes of critical interpretation andcreation for these media. Issues of identity construction, gender, corporeal vs. psychic presence,interactivity, bodily motion and motion capture, community, interface, performativity, andrepresentation will be addressed.