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

128CLIT3005.Cultural Marxism I (6 credits)This course will aim to historicize and contextualize within a comparative frame the elaboration ofMarxist cultural/aesthetic theory over the last century and a half. In this course the intersection ofmoments, spaces, and concerns of Marxist cultural theory and practice will be central. The receptionand development of Marxist aesthetic theory in West and Central Europe, in Russia, and in China willbe analysed. Texts will be read in English and Chinese.CLIT3006.Cultural Marxism II (6 credits)This course is a continuation of Part I.CLIT3007.Advanced studies in digital culture (6 credits)This course will examine theories of digital culture and attempt to develop visions for the theory andpractice of life in the digital age. We will explore issues of gender and sexualities, memory, motion,speed vs. slowness, space, and community, through readings of cultural theory, visual theory, digitaltheory, and fiction. Film, video, multimedia, and websites will form an integral part of the material tobe examined. Prerequisite: Introduction to Digital Culture, and/or Digital Culture and New MediaTechnologies.CLIT3008.Literature and philosophy (6 credits)The course asks whether literature is really philosophy and whether philosophy can be literature. Whileit explores specific texts such as Phaedrus and The Symposium which may be called either, its mainfocus is on Romanticism. Through a detailed consideration of the conjunctions of literature andphilosophy in the English and German Romantics, it asks how each mode of writing contests andcomplements the claims of the other.CLIT3013.Critiques of space (6 credits)'Space' has become a focal point of discussion in many different disciplines ranging from sociology,urban studies and architecture to literature, philosophy, cinema, and gender studies. The course willpresent - by means of films, writings, photographs, and other speculative media - the spatial issues thataffect our contemporary experience of the city and our understanding of the culture and politics of theglobalizing world.CLIT3014.Traumatic events (6 credits)This course will observe the workings of trauma (the enactment and working-through of collective andindividual symptoms of trauma), memory, and witnessing in various modes of everyday life. We willexamine notions of catastrophe, disaster, accident, and violence, and explore the possibilities andimpossibilities of bearing witness in many forms of cultural production. We will examine therepresentation of traumatic events in fiction, poetry, architecture, critical theory, visual art, philosophy,science, cartoons, film, video, television reportage, newspaper documentation, and performance, on theinternet and World Wide Web, and in the public and domestic spaces of Hong Kong.CLIT3018.Walter Benjamin as writer and cultural critic (6 credits)The course is an introduction to the seminal work of Walter Benjamin. His essays - on literature,translation, photography and film, culture and politics, the experience of cities - develop a theory ofreading and a style of argument that are indispensable to the understanding of contemporary culturaldebates.