Page 101 - SYU Prospectus

English Language & Literature

DESCRIPTION OF COURSES (MA PROGRAMME)

ENG 501 Contemporary Critical Thought
1 Term; 3 Credits
Theoretical and interdisciplinary in focus, this course brings together important thoughts
by distinguished scholars and philosophers, which centre on contemporary issues concerning
the interpretation and analysis of culture within and beyond the purview of English studies.
The course responds to a situation in which the humanities are re-evaluated continuously
together with perplexing new issues in human sciences, arts, social sciences and technosci-
ence. In the intellectual ferment over the recent decades, new inquiries have been reconfig-
ured pointing to an intercultural and multiperspectival approach to relations such as literature
and science, bioethics and gender, modernism and postmodernism, humanism and posthu-
manism. The general direction of the course is for students to be exposed to significant critical
concepts and how they undermine the self-certainty of the time-honoured categories and
assumptions within humanistic inquiries such as the integral self, representational theories of
language, the nurture/nature distinction. Students are to learn to challenge these established
presuppositions as opened up by the chosen readings in the course. The ultimate aim of the
course is for students to engage self-critically in contemporary issues, such as identity/subjectivity,
socio-cultural values, gender politics, ecoethics, cyberculture, etc, and it is expected that such
an engagement will be of help to them both in writing a dissertation as a substantial project of
research or in the context of the graduation seminar completed in lieu of a dissertation. These
issues are to be found in areas of concentration including literary texts and textuality,
semiotics, gender and body, the psyche and consciousness, science as discourse and
socio-political-cultural theories.

ENG 502 Interdisciplinary Approach to Cultural Studies
1 Term; 3 Credits
Knowledge-claims in the 21st century have gone beyond the modernist mind-set of de-
partmentalization. In an emerging network culture and unprecedented complexity of learning,
students need to adopt a more mobile and permeable "interdisciplinary" approach to what they
learn at postgraduate level. This seminar is designed for students in this programme to
achieve a sense of integration among the various components in their curriculum. Besides
reading materials which deal directly with ideas such as counter-disciplinary praxis, the
intersection of natural science, social sciences and humanities, the philosophy of difference
which stresses a relational ontology, etc, students will be initiated into the actual working of
what is now called "Interdisciplinary Studies" as an umbrella concept of such an approach.

ENG 503 Seminar in Cultural Theories and Practice
1 Term; 3 Credits
This Graduate Seminar is designed to feature a tripartite structure with equal emphasis
on three areas, namely (1) Ecocriticism, (2) Gender Studies & Society, and (3) Language &

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