Core Course

CLIT7005 Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies


This course aims to examine the changing notion of culture and the paradigmatic shifts in literary and cultural theory over the past few decades. Informed by Western Marxism, structuralism, postmodernism, feminism, postcolonialism and psychoanalysis, it maps out a landscape of critical perspectives on culture within the context of modernity and globalization. It assesses the potentialities and constraints of the cultures of capitalism in a global context. It seeks out innovative ways of articulating the intricate relations among the idea of popularity, counter culture, and the public sphere. With key concepts such as "hegemony" and "structures of feeling," it examines how culture can be perceived as a lived, active and transformative process. As popular artifacts straddle between art and industry, this course questions the strict division between high and low cultures, center and periphery, the mainstream and the independent/alternative. Drawing on literary and cultural texts produced and circulated within the deterritorialized, global space, this course focuses on the ways in which creativity, acts of resistance, and contestation of opinion enact processes of negotiation, struggle, challenge, and transformation. Topics for discussion may include film adaptation, the interfusion of high and low culture, technology and the democratization of culture, film genre, cultural myth and ideology, the global circulation of culture, and the notion of the public sphere.


Selected Texts/ Films (subject to change):
Theoretical Texts:
  • Dialectics of Enlightenment (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer)
  • Film as Social Practice (Graeme Turner)
  • Image, Music, Text (Roland Barthes)
  • Imagined Communities (Benedict Anderson)
  • Keywords (Raymond Williams)
  • The Cultural Studies Reader (Simon During, ed.)
  • The Popular Arts (Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel)
  • The Society of the Spectacle (Guy Debord)
  • Subculture (Dick Hebdige)

Literary Texts:
  • Dracula (Bram Stoker)
  • "Death and the Compass" (Jorge Luis Borges)
  • "The Purloined Letter" (Edgar Allan Poe)
  • Zhu Tianwen, "Fin-de-Siècle Splendor" 朱天文, 〈世紀末的華麗〉

Films:
  • Mcdull, Kung Fu Ding Ding Dong (Brian Tse)
  • Bride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha)
  • Echoes of the Rainbow (Alex Lau)
  • Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingstone)