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

121CLIT2027.Digital culture and new media technologies II (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)This is a continuation of Digital Culture I.CLIT2028.The city as cultural text (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)If contemporary cities are becoming more 'invisible', it is because the effects they have upon us areindirect and displaced. Our experience of cities becomes more problematic as cities themselves becomemore complex. This course explores the changing cultural space of cities mainly through major worksof fiction and of cinema, though it will include other forms like painting and architecture as well astheoretical texts. Topics for discussion include: How is urban experience transformed bycolonialism/imperialism, technology, information? What are 'world cities' and 'third world cities',cybercities and colonial cities? Is Hong Kong a 'Chinese city'? How can the city be read as a culturaltext?CLIT2031.Fashion theory (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)Fashion lies somewhere between 'art' and 'consumption', and for mysterious reasons (according tohistorian Eric Hobsbawn) often anticipates future cultural tendencies better than both. We will discussthe relation of fashion to art, media, spectacles, and marketing; to questions of identity andself-fashioning; to images of the body and ideas of femininity and masculinity; to notions of style andanti-style (e.g. jeans as degree zero fashion); to looking and having 'the look'. Throughout, the focuswill be on the surprising impact of fashion on culture, particularly contemporary culture.CLIT2034.Advanced film theory (6 credits)Adaptations from literature to film provide an extremely fertile ground for a) exploring the differentpossibilities of the two media involved and b) cross-cultural studies. Why is Kurosawa so obsessed byShakespeare? Bresson has adapted Dostoevsky, and everybody has had a go at War and Peace. Arethey successful and why? We will try to answer these questions through a comparative study of theoriginal texts and the films. Students will also be encouraged to adapt their favorite short story or novelinto film-scripts as an exercise.CLIT2035.Writing madness (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)Drawing on recent critical theory, the course will use both texts which have been described as mad,including those by Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Gilman, Holderlin, Blake, and Artaud; as well as look atrepresentations of madness, e.g. in the writings of Gogol, Lu Xun, Dostoyevsky, and Henry James, or infilms like Psycho or Seven. It will ask whether it is possible to think of writing a history of madness,without misrepresenting madness as 'other.' It will also distinguish between melancholia and manicstates, hysteria and schizophrenia, while recognising that these terms themselves, instrumental in theconstruction of madness, are part of the problem.