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

124CLIT2055.Cultures of capitalism I: Money and everyday life (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)Most of us think of money as an economic fact. Yet it is also a cultural phenomenon that penetrates allparts of everyday life and produces feelings as different as greed and charity. This course will look athow people talk, write, and feel about money. The goal of the course is to give students a sense of thevariety of meanings of money, from its role in tipping and gift-giving, to gambling, speculation, andfrauds. Students will be asked to draw materials from everyday life, movies, short stories, newspapers,and other media. The course has no background requirements and is not a prerequisite for the secondsemester.CLIT2056.Cultures of capitalism II: Modernity and post-modernity (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)Most of us think of capitalism as primarily an economic phenomenon. Yet it is also has a profoundlycultural dimension that involves culturally specific views of risk taking, speculation, and even moneyand capital. This course will provide an introduction to some of the classic works on capitalism,including Marx and Simmel, and then explore contemporary phenomena such as land speculation andthe stock market. This is not an introductory course in economics, but it will look at how people portraycapitalism in movies, novels, newspapers, and other media. Students will be expected to do a researchpaper based upon Hong Kong materials.CLIT2057.Carnival versus tragedy: Reading renaissance culture (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)The course looks at how we can read the 'early modern' period in Europe – from the fifteenth century(the period of planning the ideal city and designing the ideal body, of the development of the printedbook and of the colonization of America) to the seventeenth centuries. It uses the twin concepts ofcarnival and tragedy to look at the theatre, at representations of the body, monstrous and grotesque, andfor an examination of state power and resistances to it. Texts include works by Machiavelli, Rabelais,Shakespeare and Racine.CLIT2058.Histories of sexuality: Freud and Foucault (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)The course compares the theoretical approaches of Freud to Foucault to sexuality – a history ofrepression versus a history of the production of the subject – by looking at a number of literary andcultural texts whose interest for us is how they make problematic and fascinating either theory of thesubject.CLIT2059.Feminine roles and cultural myths (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)This course will begin with 'liminal' works which chart a traumatic rite of passage for women fromchildhood to adulthood or suggest that there might be a dynamic interplay between the two states. Itwill focus, in particular, on texts in which women directly challenge prevailing social myths of humandevelopment, family organization, and sexual relations. It will be especially interested in texts whichproceed to deconstruct the social codes governing women, their relationships, and scope for definingand expressing themselves.