This Course Guide has been taken from the most recent presentation of the course. It would be useful for reference purposes but please note that there may be updates for the following presentation.
ENGL A232
Socio-cultural Issues in English Literature
ENGL A232 Socio-cultural Issues in English Literature is a ten-credit, middle level course for undergraduate students in the Bachelor of Arts (Honours) programme. The course is designed for students who have completed the foundation level.
This course will study examples of pre-contemporary English literature, roughly from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, which address social issues within a widely defined British culture but with implications that reach beyond it. The texts we study in the course are in three main genres: narrative, drama, and poetry. Each follows special conventions, which require different kinds of attention and elicit different expectations in their readers and audiences. In each genre, the texts have been chosen in order to show two broadly different styles of realism and modernism.
This wide range of writing will encourage students to achieve a fuller understanding of how language shapes culture, whose values we internalize and mostly take for granted. After taking this course, students will be able to show how interpreting these texts will question a reader's sense of self.
In this course you will broaden your knowledge of English literature by reading some representative pre-contemporary works stemming from within a broadly defined British culture.
Course aims
ENGL A232 aims to show how literary texts engage with their social and cultural surroundings and how interpreting these texts will question a reader's sense of self.
Course learning outcomes
Upon completion of ENGL A232, students should be able to:
This is the nuts-and-bolts, informative section, providing information such as what materials are needed, and how the assignments and marking are arranged. Please read it carefully.
Course materials
In addition to this Course Guide, this course will have 10 study units. The reading of the set literary texts is of prime importance. But we should not neglect the useful critical and theoretical writings that help us to place the literature in a variety of contexts. These give insights into British society and literary theories discussed. The reference books provide a very useful background for your studies. Internet material can also prove useful. Please ensure that you have all of these materials available.
Study units
Unit 1: Reading and writing as socio-cultural and self-construction
This unit presents critical and historical perspectives and introduces ways of thinking about how we 'read' culture and understand the past. It assumes we will not understand literary texts as well as possible, if we only study literature. Awareness of philosophical, psychological and scientific theories is also crucial for understanding the cultural environment to which literary texts respond and which they challenge. The encounter with suitable visual material defamiliarizes the act of perception. We are challenged to examine how we literally see what we call reality and to ask what shapes further assumptions we normally take for granted. Such enquiry defamiliarizes habituated language and practices of reading, and encourages us to see texts and topics afresh. This unit is a preparation for the rest of the course, which investigates in detail the selected texts and how we read them.
Unit 2: Charles Dickens' Hard Times and social desire
Dickens is widely considered the 19th century's most significant contributor to English literature. He captures ways of living in London's unforgiving social world and among its most disadvantaged people. His writing has great range and readability, due to an empathetic genius, liveliness, and comic inventiveness. Prodigiously productive, Dickens was hugely popular in his lifetime. His novels continue to be read and successfully dramatized, reaching large numbers of readers and wide television audiences. This unit examines how this novel tells its story, how its narrative is structured, and how it conveys the consequences of what for Dickens' contemporaries was normality, simply the way the world was, on the emotional and physical lives of his characters.
Unit 3: James Joyce's Dubliners and cultural stagnation
Writing consistently about one seemingly restricted topic, Dublin and its inhabitants, Joyce astonished fellow writers with his innovative texts. The restrained, subtly nuanced exploration of the undramatic everyday life of its citizens, of their frustrations and repressions, their dreams, and the quiet farce and sadness of their circumscribed lives, characterizes his first completed prose work, a collection of fifteen short stories. Dubliners, a social portrait of his native city in a historical time warp, is widely regarded as the best focused collection of short stories in English.
Unlike Ulysses, Joyce's modernist masterpiece, Dubliners poses no problems for an attentive reader, entering the mentality and sensibility of a range of characters. At the same time the text maintains an understated outside perspective on the circumstances that shape their lives.
Unit 4: G B Shaw's Pygmalion, class and language
We read a dramatic text differently from narrative fiction. In the theatre, the performance becomes the play. The advantage of reading the script or text, before or without performance, is that nothing is settled. The reader must create an interpretation, choosing among possibilities, and direct a performance in the head.
Shaw, a social reformer, was the most popular English dramatist in the first half of the 20th century and Pygmalion (1912) his best liked play. After distinguishing himself as a music critic, he embraced the life of a public intellectual, expected and expecting to pronounce on the socio-cultural issues of the day. As a lifelong advocate of women's rights, he opposed all forms of social exclusion as a hypocritical defense of privilege. Pygmalion invites us to consider many social issues in addition to the then virtually insurmountable social barriers within English society.
Unit 5: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, modernism and the cultural frame
Beckett's persona and the focus of his writing were the antithesis of Shaw's. The characters in Waiting for Godot exist in a waste land of hope, where suffering is to be endured. In their world nothing happens. They live on the edge, constantly waiting, without much expectation, for something to turn up. The figures are not specifically located and the play has been read as a bleak vision of existential despair and loss or as religious and philosophical allegory. Waiting for Godot offers an interpretive challenge, yet Beckett's late modernism, apart from subjective impulses he may have had, is shaped by the objective pressure of historical experience: two catastrophic world wars, economic collapse and deprivation, and personal risk which, had he not escaped arrest, would have almost certainly led to his execution.
Unit 6: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, imperialism and the colonial mind
Heart of Darkness, an iconic text by the extraordinary Joseph Conrad, published in 1899, encapsulates, as perhaps no other work, the encounter between the so-called Dark Continent of Africa and the supposedly enlightened imperialist mind, which justified its enslavement and exploitation of conquered territories with a professedly civilizing mission. The reality of this encroachment was entirely different, and its consequences are felt to this day. Loosely based on Conrad's personal experiences as a river boat captain on the Congo, this remarkable novella portrays the self-inflicted psychological damage among the colonizers. It raises fascinating questions about the relationship between fact and fiction and suggests comparisons, on various levels, with Bronislaw Malinowski's anthropology and with Francis Ford Coppola's film, Apocalypse Now.
Unit 7: Virginia Woolf's Orlando, desire and the social unconscious
Orlando, A Biography is a playful narrative fantasy about a time-traveling, gender-changing person, at the beginning a young nobleman, favoured by an elderly Queen Elizabeth I, until he chases after an attractive visiting Russian Princess. After adventures abroad as ambassador, without warning or description of any kind, he has suddenly become a woman. Living in successive historical periods, her biography ends in 1928, when she is thirty-six, or thereabouts, with complete recollection of her experiences over more than three hundred years. Though moving through historically explicit time periods, history 'itself,' which of course means history of the history books, does not really function in this novel, because this is a history of life as differently experienced. This invites us to consider how a female voice has drawn attention to the bias of gender difference in the history of writing.
Unit 8: Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol and social degradation
The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a searing indictment of a penal system of justice, which Wilde experienced at first hand. Quite unlike the rest of his poetry, its mixture of disgust and horror is anticipated by other, less emotionally expressive, signs of a critical social conscience. Like his paradoxes, it is grounded in sincerely held opinions, evident in The Soul of Man under Socialism. The Ballad of Reading Gaol draws on Wilde's extensive knowledge of literature, echoing passages from Dante's Inferno. It also stands in a long and popular, socially critical ballad tradition, and is therefore characterized by clear exposition. In terms of poetry's transition to modernism, it stays firmly on the realist side of the divide and that also has to do with a desire to reach a wider public.
Unit 9: T S Eliot's The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land, cultural disorientation
Radical modernists, like Eliot, changed the shape, the form, and the way in which things are said. They had to break the reflecting mirror and then reassemble the pieces. Living in times of rapid scientific and cultural change, it is hard to understand what is happening, let alone what lies ahead. Modernism looked to the New but what strikes us later is how it draws on the Old. If the future is invisible, we can revisit the past, and use it to imagine a different present. Eliot's poems are interwoven with explicit and implicit allusions to countless other artists, and thinkers. He sought ways of creating order to counter the chaos and crisis of what he experienced as a fallen and debased modern world by revisiting older beliefs and by invoking non-European myths of destruction and continuance in some of the most original, and memorable, modern English poetry.
Unit 10: The imagination and its environment
If Clifford Geertz thought of sociology as an interpretive, rather than an exact, science, we can think of the study of literature as textual anthropology. If they are to prove fruitful, textual encounters will develop self-awareness, which is a pre-condition for any interpretive act.
This unit summarizes positions and critical attitudes within different socio-cultural environments, the opportunities offered by literary forms to engage with contemporary problems, and how the imagination familiarizes and defamiliarizes them with the intention of achieving better understanding.
Assignment File
There are four assignments for grading, three written ones and an oral. A specific Assignment File is provided for this purpose. You can check for more information on assignments in the Course Guide section on 'Assessment' that follows, and in the Assignment File itself. There is also a final examination.
Presentation Schedule
The Presentation Schedule is available on the OLE, and it gives the dates for completing your assignments, and for attending tutorials, day schools, and so on.
Set texts
Students need to obtain the following set texts:
Reference books
Audiovisual materials/software
You will need to access the Internet at certain points in this course, so Web access capability is necessary for the course.
For those students not having Internet access, HKMU's computer labs provide Web access that is sufficient for this course.
Video
There are film adaptations (e.g. My Fair Lady) which may help you understand some of the texts discussed in the course. These films are likely to be available at HKMU's Stanley Ho Library. Please check with your tutor.
Websites
Students may find some the following websites useful:
www.wikipedia.org/wiki/ (then type in an author, title, or subject and then search)
Equipment needed (IT resources)
Hardware
Software
These will enable you to write and also consult information available through the Internet. Please note that you may also be required to download some free software to your computer for recording your oral presentation to be submitted online for Assignment 4.
Assessment
Continuous assessment
Continuous assessment for ENGL A232 will be built upon two approaches. The first is the traditional essay mode, which will be used in the first three assignments of the course. The second approach is the motivational mode of oral presentation assessment.
Assignments
There will be three assignments in the form of essays. Assignment 1 covers Units 1 to 3. Assignment 2 relates to Units 4 and 5. Assignment 3 covers Units 6 and 7. These three assignments emphasize your critical, analytical and writing abilities and are designed to help you explore the selected literary texts and relevant concepts further. These three assignments comprise 35% of the total course marks.
Oral presentation
The second approach to continuous assessment requires students to make an oral presentation by audio recording, to be submitted through the OLE. This comprises 15% of the total course marks.
Final examination
The final examination will be course-wide in scope and will cover all dimensions of ENGL A232. Through a three-hour examination session, students will have the opportunity to display their understanding and analytical ability in the learned areas. Both short questions and essay questions will be included. This examination aims to assess each of the course learning outcomes.
The assessment items are outlined in the following table:
| Assessment | Course area covered | Weighting |
| Assignment 1 | Units 1-3 | 10% |
| Assignment 2 | Units 4-5 | 10% |
| Assignment 3 | Units 6-7 | 15% |
| Assignment 4 (Oral presentation to be submitted via the OLE) | Entire course | 15% |
| Exam | Entire course | 50% |
| Total | 100% | |
This table brings together the units, the time taken to complete them, and the assignments that follow them.
| Unit | Topic | Weeks |
| 1 | Reading and writing as socio-cultural and self-construction | 3 |
| 2 | Charles Dickens' Hard Times and social desire | 3 |
| 3 | James Joyce's Dubliners and cultural stagnation | 3 |
| Assignment 1 | ||
| 4 | G B Shaw's Pygmalion, class and language | 3 |
| 5 | Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, modernism and the cultural frame | 3 |
| Assignment 2 | ||
| Revision | 3 | |
| 6 | Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, imperialism and the colonial mind | 3 |
| 7 | Virginia Woolf's Orlando, desire and the social unconscious | 3 |
| Assignment 3 | ||
| 8 | Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol and social degradation | 3 |
| 9 | T S Eliot's The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land, cultural disorientation | 3 |
| 10 | The imagination and its environment | 3 |
| Assignment 4 (oral presentation) | ||
| Revision | 3 | |
| Final examination | ||
| Total | 36 | |
Please ensure that you make the most of tutor contact and tutorials, the day school, and online materials.
To reach the desired learning outcomes, good students will need to:
Tutors and tutorials
This course has 20 hours of tutorials (i.e. ten sessions of two hours each) and two day schools (1.5 hours each). You are strongly encouraged to attend and participate in these face-to-face sessions.
Assignment extension policy
The assignment policy of the University as stated in the Student Handbook should be observed. Students are required to submit assignments for a course in accordance with the dates communicated by the Course Coordinator. Students may apply for a submission extension on the grounds of illness, accident, disability, bereavement or other compassionate circumstances.
Applications for extensions of up to seven days should be submitted to the tutor. The tutor shall consider valid and unexpected emergencies on an individual basis. Normally, documented proof of the extenuating circumstances is not required for extensions of up to seven days. The tutor shall decide and advise the student of the revised date for submission.
For extensions of over seven days, students should note the following:
According to the University's policy, there is no extension of the due date for the final assignment.
Online Learning Environment
This course is supported by the Online Learning Environment (OLE). You can find course materials and the latest course information from the OLE. Through the OLE, you can also communicate with your tutors, the Course Coordinator as well as fellow students. For details about the OLE and how to access it, please refer to the Online Learning Environment User Guide.
ENGL A232 is a course designed to introduce students to the socio-cultural issues in pre-contemporary English literature. It focuses on three literary genres: fiction, poetry and drama. The course first discusses what 'reading' is and how interpretation of a text can be shaped by factors that readers may take for granted. We then examine each set text by addressing various socio-cultural issues such as social desire, cultural stagnation, class and language, modernism, social degradation and cultural disorientation.
In studying the course, you will be provided with written study units. Support will be provided through tutorials, day school sessions and the OLE. The course will be assessed though three written assignments, one oral assignment to be submitted online, and a final examination.
Good luck and enjoy the course!
Antony Tatlow is Honorary Professor in the Drama Department, Samuel Beckett Centre, University of Dublin. Previously he was Professor of Comparative Literature and Coordinator of the Graduate Centre for Arts Research at the University of Dublin (1996–2005), founding head of the Department and Professor of Comparative Literature (1987–1996) at the University of Hong Kong, where he taught from 1965–1996.
He has been President of the International Brecht Society from 1982–1990, and Consultant to the Central Academy of Drama, Beijing from 1986, and a Member of Academia Europaea from 1999.
He has been Visiting Professor at Peking University, and the University of Dublin, Research Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University and guest lecturer at a large number of universities.
In addition to publications on the poetry, theatre and thought of Bertolt Brecht, he has published numerous articles and the following books: Repression and Figuration — From Totem to Utopia (1990), Shakespeare in Comparison: A Politics of the Sign (1995), Benwen Renleixue [Textual Anthropology: A Practice of Reading] (1996), Shakespeare, Brecht and the Intercultural Sign (2001).
He was awarded the 2002 Book Prize of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
| Socio-cultural Issues in English Literature is dedicated to Claus Detjen. |
