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

126CLIT2065.Hong Kong culture: Representations of identity in literature and film (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)This course traces the formation of identities in Hong Kong history and analyzes different perspectivesin understanding these identities. It focuses on various forms of colonization and their influences on theconstruction of cultural artifacts and relationships. Various theoretical approaches and debates onpostcolonialism, capitalism, and urban culture will be adopted to examine selected texts of literatureand film.CLIT2066.Postmodernism (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)We are constantly bombarded with images by the media day and night. MTV is equally popular in thedeveloped as well as in the developing countries. The old distinction between high culture and popularculture is breaking down. Literature and film genres are being constantly mixed, resulting in compositeand hybrid works. More and more Hong Kong Chinese live in Toronto, Melbourne, London and SanFrancisco while more and more Filipinos come to Hong Kong as housemaids. The postmodern world isfull of fascinating phenomena. In this course we plan to study postmodernism by focusing on literature,cinema, art, and other cultural productions. The aim of the course is not to define postmodernism butrather to evoke and question it as we seek to make sense of the radical changes taking place in ideas andexperiences related to technology, entertainment, art, everyday life and the problems of representation.CLIT2067.Re-placing Shakespeare (6 credits)This course 'replaces' Shakespeare not by removing his work from the agenda, but by reconsidering hisplace in contemporary criticism and popular cultural practice. Some of the topics the course may dealwith are: feminist, psychoanalytic and literary historicist re-readings of Shakespeare's texts;comparisons of how international film directors, with their differing multi-cultural perceptives, havehandled the problems of filming Shakespeare; and the way that Shakespeare has been adapted andre-imagined by innovative and influential modern artists.CLIT2068.Gender dialogue in Maxine Hong Kingston: An intertextual study of The WomanWarrior and China Men (6 credits)Maxine Hong Kingston herself admitted that The Woman Warrior and China Men were first conceivedas one big saga. In the end, however, she created two distinct narratives of the Chinese women and menwho made Hong Family history. Her stated rationale for this was that “my men’s stories wereweakening the feminist point of view. So I took all the men’s stories out, and then I had The WomanWarrior. Yet this reinforcement of “the feminist point of view” created gender imbalance in her texts. Itfocused critical attention on The Woman Warrior, and allowed women readers, in particular, to ignorethe fact that China Men was written as a sequel to The Woman Warrior or as volume two of her familysaga. It has provoked a literary battle of the sexes and led some Chinese American male critics toconclude that Hong Kingston’s writing emasculates China Men either by cutting them out of thewomen’s stories or by representing them as effeminate and powerless in their own narratives. Thiscourse aims to subvert this gender polarity by reading The Woman Warrior and China Men back intomore integral relationship to one another. It will consider theories of intertextuality that suggest adynamic interplay between the two books ad that open up the possibility of gender dialogue and a moreinclusive exchange of views. It will look at intertexts from high and popular culture that can helpreaders to understand the overall significance of the two books and that represent men and women asco-producers of meaning. These may include (in whole or part) Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The ScarletLetter, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain, Lucille Ball’s “ILove Lucy” show, and the films Crouching Tigers and Hidden Dragons and The Matrix.