Program Structure

This course explores several topics in the history of literary criticism and critical theory. These include, among others, interpretation; canon formation; ideology; class, race, gender, and sexuality; discourse; hegemony; signification; and performativity. We will read key texts from every period in the Western canon, concluding with New Historicism and trauma theory.

In acknowledgement of the broad plurality of modern experience, and of the literatures in English depicting it, the course will explore the broad canon of modern literature as constructed comparatively across diverse linguistic, cultural and national contexts. The course will search for a broader rendering of “Modernist” culture, embracing old and new and ranging across the arts and media.

This course is designed to engage students in critical discussions about aspects of literature from a world perspective. Students will examine major issues and concepts pertaining to the study of world literature and/or comparative literature with reference to selected literary texts. The relationship between literature and culture will be emphasised and different perspectives will be adopted for reading and interpreting world literature. Specific topics may vary from year to year.

This course examines the conceptualization and historical moments of “literatures in the world”. It begins by discussing the problematics in the way academic disciplines historically and politically situate literature as institutionalized “study”—national, imperial and ideological. The course then looks at two examples of literary imagination travelling in the world, with a focus on the historical transformation of the idea of the Mongol Empire since the 18th century up to present times. The two examples comprise literary imaginations and constructions travelling around the world, as expressions of such industrial and global formations such as expansive colonialism, civilizational universalism, economic globalization, and global tourism. Together, these instances of travel demand that we rethink the linear structure of (comparative) literary history. Eventually, this course shows students of literature and culture in the 21st century how and why historical, comparative, critical and imaginative work sustains the Auerbachian humanist tradition.

This course will focus on the following topics: knowledge and institution; industrial capital and global capital; literary imagination, travel and influence; translation and trans-nation, intellectual globalization. 

This course compares and analyses different national literatures and their non-literary counterparts. Emphasis will be placed on widening students’ literary horizon, examining the similarities and differences among cultures, analysing the aesthetic exchange between literature, media, and nonfiction in a global context, and helping students develop their moral and ethical positions in response to different cultural, political, religious traditions.

The Programme offers students an interesting array of elective courses suiting different research foci and interests. The study curriculum may change from time to time. Please refer to the University Student Handbook for details of the list of the elective courses.

Students wishing to enroll in the MA Thesis must obtain satisfactory grades in the Graduate Research Seminar and submit a detailed research prospectus for the proposed project. The MA Thesis is an independent study, equivalent to an elective course taken during the second semester for full-time students and during the fourth semester for part-time students. Successful completion of the MA Thesis will result in a publishable, extended research essay.