Events & News

Research Seminar: "Study abroad and the city: Factoring space into the experience of international education"

Prof. Phil Benson
Applied Linguistics and Director of the Multilingualism Research Centre at Macquarie University

Date: 23 April 2021 (Fri)
Time: 11:30am
Zoom Meeting ID: 972 5772 4087
Password: 583805
Direct Link: Enter

Abstract:
To the many factors that are now considered relevant to study abroad (SA) and international education (IE) – programme type and duration, age and gender, social interaction and networking, accommodation, and so on – this paper proposes that we should add participants’ uses of urban space. We might imagine SA/IE participants as agents freely roaming the wide open and richly language spaces of the cities in which they study. But in practice participants make use of only a fraction of the spaces of the cities they temporarily inhabit. Based on data from Hong Kong students studying English overseas (SA) and international students studying English in Sydney, Australia (IE), I will outline some of the factors that shape participants’ uses of urban space and the potential implications of the spatiality of the SA/IE experience for language learning.

Bio:
Phil Benson is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Director of the Multilingualism Research Centre at Macquarie University. His current research interests are in language learning and space, urban multilingualism and, especially, the learning and use of English in multilingual societies.

Book Launch: "Michael O’Sullivan’s Lockdown Lovers (Penguin 2021)"

Prof. Michael O'Sullivan
Department of English
CUHK

Date: 9 April 2021 (Fri)
Time: 5:00pm
Zoom Meeting ID: 972 5772 4087
Password: 583805
Direct Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/97257724087?pwd=emV0OXoyUk5XMjdUTS9IUEptSGl5Zz09

Abstract:
Lockdown Lovers is a love story set in lockdown conditions across two continents. Pushed to the limits of their endurance in lockdown and then quarantine conditions, John Ryan, a Hong Kong academic, and Phoebe Ho, a Hong Kong District councillor, decide to break the rules of their quarantine and rediscover what has been denied them for too long, passionate human contact. The novel alternates between the perspectives of John, Phoebe, Kwok-ying, a Government Health official, John’s wife Sue, his son Sam, Princess Selina, a millionaire’s heiress, and a pangolin, the mammal reportedly at the root of the virus, as they all find their own way to deal with the dramatic changes in their environments. In Part III John even travels back to Ireland desperate to assist his parents in their lockdown. Haunted by the memory of touch Phoebe opened him up to in quarantine, he realises he must return to Hong Kong to rediscover love with his wife and son. The story ends in Hong Kong in 2022, 2 years after the first appearance of the virus in the city. The novel reminds us of our undying capacities for contact and closeness even at times of pandemic when they seem under threat like never before.

Bio:
Michael O’Sullivan is a Professor in the dept of English at CUHK. He has taught on literature and language for universities in Ireland, the UK, the US, Japan and Hong Kong. He has published 12 books. Recent relevant publications include The Humanities in Contemporary Chinese Contexts (Springer 2016) (with Evelyn Chan); The Humanities and the Irish University: Anomalies and Opportunities (Manchester UP 2014): Academic Barbarism, Universities, and Inequality (Palgrave 2016); Postcolonial Economies (Routledge) (with Maureen Ruprecht Fadem). He is a founding editor of the Chinese University Press journal Hong Kong Studies.

Research Seminar: "Cultural Compradors and South Asian Drama – The Making of the Theatre of Empire"

Prof. Rashna Darius Nicholson
Department of English
University of Hong Kong

Date: 26 March 2021 (Fri)
Time: 5:00pm
Zoom Meeting ID: 972 5772 4087
Password: 583805
Direct Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/97257724087?pwd=emV0OXoyUk5XMjdUTS9IUEptSGl5Zz09

Abstract:
This presentation introduces one of the core arguments – cultural compradors – in Dr. Rashna D. Nicholson’s current book project The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage. The paper demonstrates how the Parsis, followers of Zoroastrianism and compradors in the colonial opium and cotton trade, facilitated the emergence and development of the ‘modern' South Asian theatre in the second half of the nineteenth century. Colonialism, as has frequently been noted, was realized through not merely a coercive machinery of military, economic and political phenomena, but also cultural technologies of power and the comprador trader, the first burgher or bourgeois, herein played a decisive role. Yet several studies have also argued that compradorial complicity was not wholly unalloyed by demonstrating a considerable overlap between national and comprador elements that is, between early national industrialization and colonial capital. Doubly peripheral, belonging neither to the worlds translated from nor to the worlds translated to, Parsis as compradors negotiated zones of difference, inhabiting a grey area of constant ambiguity. The book traces how the Parsis not only domesticated the imperial project through acts of translation but also created sites for self-representation and subsequently for sedition and subversion through their critical role in the development of the vernacular public sphere.

Bio:
Rashna Darius Nicholson is an assistant professor in the Department of English at The University of Hong Kong. She holds a PhD (summa cum laude) in Theatre Studies from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research and teaching specializations include nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty first century theatre history, historiography, and practice; postcolonial and world literature; and cultural development. Dr. Nicholson is the author of The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage: The Making of the Theatre of Empire (1853-1893), due to be published in 2021. She is currently working on two projects: the influence of the Rockefeller and Ford foundations on theatre in the Global South during and after the Cold War and the lost theatre buildings of Hong Kong.

Research Seminar: ‘Eat bread with every meal, preferably wholemeal bread’: Governmentality, normativity and the management of migration in Sweden

Prof. Tommaso M. Milani
Professor of Multilingualism
University of Gothenburg

Date: 12 March 2021 (Fri)
Time: 5:00pm
Zoom Meeting ID: 972 5772 4087
Password: 583805
Direct Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/97257724087?pwd=emV0OXoyUk5XMjdUTS9IUEptSGl5Zz09

Abstract:
The aim of this talk is to present some preliminary results from a larger interdisciplinary policy ethnographic project that investigates courses in civic orientation for newly arrived adult migrants in Sweden. Offered in the main languages spoken by migrants (e. g. Arabic, Farsi, Tigrinja), courses in civic orientation are geared to facilitating newly arrived adult migrants’ entrance into the labour market and Swedish society by providing ‘basic understanding of Swedish society’ with the help of ‘dialogue and reflection’ (Regulation 2010:1138). With the help of ethnographic data, we illustrate how civic orientation is not simply an educational provision that gives migrants information about Swedish laws and regulations or that presents different perspectives on, say, food practices as equally valid. Rather, we show the presence of a subtly normative element, one in which what Swedes eat is something that migrants need to acquire and emulate. More specifically, drawing upon Foucault’s (1991) notion of governmentality and biopower, we illustrate how adult migrants are encouraged to undergo an internal overhaul, abandoning their unhealthy habits, changing their routines, eating and drinking differently, and adopting a different lifestyle through which they can become healthy ‘Swedish’ citizens. Ultimately, through an analysis of civic orientation, it is possible to give a granular description of the ways in which Swedish biopolitics play out in relation to the management of migration.

Bio:
Tommaso M. Milani is Professor of Multilingualism at the University of Gothenburg; he also holds visiting professorships at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and Umeå University. He is interested in the ways in which power imbalances are (re)produced and/or contested through semiotic means. His main research foci are: language ideologies, language policy and planning, linguistic landscape, as well as language, gender and sexuality. He is co-editor of the journal Language in Society.

Research Seminar: “Divine violence, ironic silence, and poetic justice in Conrad’s The Secret Agent”

Prof. Jay Parker
Assistant Professor
English Department
Hang Seng University of Hong Kong

Date: 26 February 2021 (Fri)
Time: 11:30am
Zoom Meeting ID: 972 5772 4087
Password: 583805
Direct Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/97257724087?pwd=emV0OXoyUk5XMjdUTS9IUEptSGl5Zz09

Abstract:
This talk will explore a resonance between Joseph Conrad’s political novel The Secret Agent and Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence. I will argue that Conrad draws upon literary techniques, particularly the ironic treatment of silence to explore violence, justice and ambiguity that anticipates elements of Benjamin’s essay. This treatment of Conrad and political theory revolves around a Benjaminian reading of the productive ambiguity of irony in particular and literature in general, to provide a sense of how literature helps us to think through the political uncertainties. I interpret Benjamin’s concept of divine violence as a form of poetic justice, a trope frequently read as unfit for elitist modernist art. Yet Conrad situates literature in relation to popular culture to suggest that both are necessary to articulate and reflect critically upon truth. Divine violence as poetic justice emerges as a standard by which political settlements might be judged, whilst Conrad’s pervasive irony provides a productive ambiguity that works to maintain indeterminacy that is necessary to Benjamin.

Bio:
Jay Parker is Assistant Professor in the English Department of the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. He has published articles on Conrad in relation to liberalism and to justice in Textual Practice, Law and Literature and The Conradian. He was awarded the Juliet McLauchlan Prize in 2012 and the Bruce Harkness Young Scholar Award in 2015 for his research on Conrad, and is Advisory Editor for The Conradian. He is currently completing a book on Conrad and Liberalism.

DSE Talks

Zoom Meeting ID: 985 8489 1765
Direct Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/98584891765

This series of talks aims to deepen your understanding of some key texts on the Literature in English DSE Syllabus. They will also cover themes relevant to the English DSE Syllabus: Reading and Writing. They will be broadly relevant to anyone thinking of applying to the CUHK Department of English. Each talk will go for around 30mins. We hope you enjoy them!

4 March, 5:00 p.m.
Reading Blake’s “Chimney Sweeper”s
by Prof. Li Ou

8 March, 5:00 p.m.
Taming of the Shrew in Performance
by Prof. Julian Lamb

11 March, 5:00 p.m.
Sylvia Plath: On “Crossing the Water” and “Mushrooms”
by Prof. Eddie Tay

22 March, 5:00 p.m.
Writing a good essay: From ideas to organization
by Prof. Prem Phyak

31 March, 4:30 p.m.
How do our eyes move when we read?
by Prof. Jookyoung Jung

Recordings of these talk will be uploaded to the CUHK English
Department YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/englishcuhk

King Lear and Trump

Prof. Julian Lamb
Department of English

Date: 17 December 2020 (Thur)
Time: 5:00pm
Zoom Meeting ID: 939 7601 7688
Direct Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/93976017688

Both King Lear and Donald Trump might be said to rage against an inevitability: that human leaders, whether as a consequence of old age or an election, must eventually relinquish power. In this talk, I will attempt to shed light on one specific aspect of how the unwillingness to relinquish power takes shape: both individuals perform utterances that they do not have the authority to perform. Such utterances have the paradoxical character of posing as gestures of power which ultimately show, however, how little power the speaker actually has.

Research Seminar: Kelvin Everest’s Kowtow

Prof. Kelvin Everes
Emeritus A.C.Bradley
Professor of Modern Literature
University of Liverpool

Date: 27 November 2020 (Fri)
Time: 4:30pm
Zoom Meeting ID: 972 5772 4087
Password: 583805
Direct Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/97257724087?pwd=emV0OXoyUk5XMjdUTS9IUEptSGl5Zz09
Handout: Download now

Abstract:
This brief paper will introduce some newly emergent features of Shelley’s developing lyric style in the poems he was writing during the last five months of his life, February to July 1822. These features include a continuing impulse to experiment with variation within metrical pattern, and the elaboration of a range of loosely connected images and motifs, all apparently connected with his strengthening feelings for Jane Williams. Examples will be drawn from short lyrics drafted by Shelley in his notebooks (see the handout).

Bio:
Kelvin Everest is Emeritus A. C. Bradley Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Liverpool. He is a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College Cambridge, and also spent a period as a Research Fellow at St John’s College Oxford. Over the past thirty years his research has concentrated mainly on Shelley, including several essays and chapters and two edited collections. Professor Everest has served on the Research Panel of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and is Associate Editor of the New Dictionary of National Biography (with responsibility for all literary subjects born 1770-1825). As Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool, 2001-2016, Professor Everest worked extensively in China to develop Xian Jiaotong Liverpool University, in Suzhou, and he has a long-standing interest in the history and culture of China.

Research Seminar: Kelvin Everest’s Kowtow

Prof. Kelvin Everes
Emeritus A.C.Bradley
Professor of Modern Literature
University of Liverpool

Date: 20 November 2020 (Fri)
Time: 4:30pm
Zoom Meeting ID: 972 5772 4087
Password: 583805
Direct Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/97257724087?pwd=emV0OXoyUk5XMjdUTS9IUEptSGl5Zz09

Abstract:
Kowtow is a novel about the relationship between Britain and China, past and present. It is set at two different periods, and the narrative alternates between them. One period is the late eighteenth century, when in 1792 the first-ever British diplomatic mission to China set off by ship under the leadership of Lord Macartney. They reached China after a nine-month journey and attempted to establish diplomatic and trade relations on, as the British understood it, an equitable basis. The embassy ultimately failed, with subsequent disastrous consequences for Qing-dynasty China in the nineteenth century. The other period is 2010, the year of the Shanghai world expo. A British academic travels to China by plane to finalise arrangements for a new British-style University in Suzhou. His mission too ends in failure. The main preoccupation of the novel is to represent the reversal of power relations between the two countries which takes place between the late eighteenth century, and the early twenty-first century. At the beginning of that period, British Imperial expansionism and mercantile aggression leads to an overwhelming of Chinese power as it is exposed to the technological advances of the West. By the end of the period, the relations are beginning to work in the opposite way.

Bio:
Kelvin Everest is Emeritus A. C. Bradley Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Liverpool. He is a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College Cambridge, and also spent a period as a Research Fellow at St John’s College Oxford. Over the past thirty years his research has concentrated mainly on Shelley, including several essays and chapters and two edited collections. Professor Everest has served on the Research Panel of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and is Associate Editor of the New Dictionary of National Biography (with responsibility for all literary subjects born 1770-1825). As Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool, 2001-2016, Professor Everest worked extensively in China to develop Xian Jiaotong Liverpool University, in Suzhou, and he has a long-standing interest in the history and culture of China.

How to ask questions in conference discussion sessions: A typological and genre-based perspective

Dr. Xiaoyu Xu
Department of English
City University of Hong Kong

Date: 6 November 2020 (Fri)
Time: 11:30am
Zoom Meeting ID: 972 5772 4087
Password: 583805
Direct Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/97257724087?pwd=emV0OXoyUk5XMjdUTS9IUEptSGl5Zz09

Abstract:
Raising questions in conference discussion sessions can be a challenging encounter for novice academics. Discussants are often not only interested in seeking answers and exchanging ideas with the presenter, but also projecting a positive image of themselves by asking the ‘right’ questions. Therefore, novice academics and EFL speakers often fear looking foolish, unprofessional and non-academic by posing lengthy, unfocused, convoluted questions or comments. However, little help has been provided because of the scant attention given to this discourse and a shortage of pedagogical materials. This study, therefore, attempts to fill the gap by investigating the question types and genre-based moves of 268 turns taken by discussants in 80 computer science conference discussion sessions. Two turn types, five question types and seven genre-based moves were found. The comprehensive findings can be incorporated into instructional materials for computer science PhD students. Extending these findings into the classroom can help students understand the communicative context as well as develop the skills to professionally formulate contextually situated questions and manage interpersonal relationships.

Bio:
Xiaoyu Xu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong. Her interests include English for Academic Purposes (EAP), English for Specific Purposes (ESP), corpus linguistics, discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and intercultural communication. She has a particular interest in using corpus methods and discourse analysis to explore argumentation in all kinds of discourse. Her previous research focuses on stance and generic moves in EAP writing. Her current projects investigate discursive practices in EAP genres such as conference discussion sessions and MOOC lectures and ESP genres such as webchat exchanges for online customer service.

Introducing “Nineteenth-Century Novels on Screen” and “Romanticism”

Prof. Li Ou
Department of English

Date: 23 October 2020 (Fri)
Time: 5:00pm
Zoom Meeting ID: 929 3810 3071
Direct Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/92938103071

In this short talk Prof. Li will introduce to you these two courses, in particular: what texts and film/TV adaptations we will study, how we are going to approach them, and why it matters to study these literary/filmic texts.

Fighting fake news: Understanding how online disinformation works

Prof. Ron Darvin
Department of English

Date: 22 October 2020 (Thur)
Time: 5:00pm
Zoom Meeting ID: 973 3732 2435
Direct Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/97337322435

Why do people create fake news and how can we spot it? This talk shows us how we can examine language more closely to detect online disinformation.

From Prestige to Popularity: International Prize Culture and Adaptation

Prof. Eric Sandberg
Department of English
City University of Hong Kong

Date: 9 October 2020 (Fri)
Time: 11:30am
Zoom Meeting ID: 972 5772 4087
Password: 583805
Direct Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/97257724087?pwd=emV0OXoyUk5XMjdUTS9IUEptSGl5Zz09

Abstract:
Adaptations are frequently seen as second-order cultural phenomena, ‘derivative in relation to [. . .] the “original”’ and tainted by their popularizing function. Yet adaptation as process and product has become an ever more central aspect of the global entertainment industry, particularly in terms of cross-cultural dissemination (Bortolotti and Hutcheon 443, 453). This dissemination can take many forms. A narrative from one cultural and linguistic context can be adapted into another medium and culture, or an adapted work can begin to circulate far beyond its original national context. An adaptive work can also break free of any particular national context to become part of a global cultural discourse, often circulating in a number of different forms.

A key factor in all these forms of ‘cross-border’ adaptation is what James English has described as the ‘prize economy’ (199), or the extensive culture of awards, prizes, and honours that facilitates the conferral, accrual, distribution, and fungibility of cultural prestige. When cultural products cross borders (medium-specific, cultural, linguistic, or national) a set of commercial and aesthetic issues comes into play. On the one hand, a work that has already succeeded in one context may succeed – both critically and financially – in another; on the other hand, the very unfamiliarity of the work thus transposed may work against the desired success. Prize culture can provide an external criterion to guide the selection of works for adaptation, and facilitate the transferal of cultural prestige into popular success. This process can become self-perpetuating as works awarded prizes in one medium or cultural context are selected for adaptation into another within which they are again recognized through prize-giving.

This talk will examine issues arising from the intersection of adaptive practices and processes, the concretization of cultural prestige in the form of prizes, and the tensions involved in a cultural product moving from one context to another. I will argue that prize culture acts as both motive force and mediator within this process, and thus within twenty-first century culture more generally.

Bio:
Eric Sandberg completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh, and is currently an Assistant Professor at City University of Hong Kong and a Docent at the University of Oulu, Finland. His research interests range from modernist fiction to the contemporary novel, and his work often explores the borderlands between literary and popular fiction, but also deals with adaptation and the role of nostalgia in cultural production and consumption. His monograph on Virginia Woolf was published in 2014. He co-edited Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige (Palgrave) in 2017, and edited 100 Greatest Literary Detectives (Rowman & Littlefield) in 2018. He is Assistant Editor of Edinburgh UP’s journal Crime Fiction Studies, and his work has appeared in journals including Ariel, The Cambridge Quarterly, Critique, Neohelicon, Partial Answers and the Journal of Modern Literature.

Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics

Prof. Jason Gleckman
Department of English
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Date: 25 September 2020 (Fri)
Time: 11:30am
Zoom Meeting ID: 972 5772 4087
Password: 583805
Direct Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/97257724087?pwd=emV0OXoyUk5XMjdUTS9IUEptSGl5Zz09

Abstract:
In this talk, Jason Gleckman will explain the major ideas of his recent book, Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics (Palgrave Press 2019).

In relation to religious history, the book’s premise is that, while tensions between Catholics and Protestants in Europe in the sixteenth century were largely a matter of nationalism and politics, there were also sufficient intellectual/theological differences between the two groups as to justify calling the Protestant Reformation a revolution in Christian thought, almost the origin of a new faith. This talk will briefly outline some of these features of early modern Protestantism that most dramatically distinguish it from earlier Christian beliefs and justify speaking of it as a new way of conceiving the relationship between God and humans.

The talk will also provide examples of these ‘new’ Protestant ways of thinking, taken from the plays of William Shakespeare (1564-1616). The (unspoken and unprovable) conclusion is that the adoption of Protestant thinking is one of the factors that make Shakespeare’s plays so memorable.

Bio:
Professor Jason Gleckman taught in the English Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong for 25 years, from 1995-2020. He is now happily retired but remains actively engaged in the reading and teaching of literature.

Literature and Human Rights

Professor Eli Park Sorensen will introduce his course “Literature and Human Rights“ during the YouTube Live Talk. Below is the course description:

“This course takes a closer look at the intimate connections between literature and human rights. The history of human rights has always been accompanied by literary texts; conversely, some of the most important literary texts in the world have focused on human rights issues. People who have suffered abuse and human rights violations have often articulated their painful stories in a variety of literary genres — in the hope of being heard, achieving recognition, bearing witness to events that have defined their lives. These stories thus constitute important documents around which rights campaigns and communities are built. During the course, we will look at the history of human rights literature, as well as various case studies — including Stolen Generation narratives in Australia, narratives by women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army, political dissident narratives, and more recent refugee literature. No previous studies in literature needed to take this course. Students interested exploring the relevance of literary imagination and narrative for human rights discourse are welcome to attend this course.”

Date: 26 June 2020 (Friday)
Time: 11:00am Hong Kong Time
Language: English
Speaker: Professor Eli Park Sorensen, Department of English, CUHK
Direct Link: https://youtu.be/c2ktaptAfNc

Crime Fiction

This course takes a closer look at the genre of crime fiction. The course outlines a broad perspective of the genre of crime fiction from its earliest incarnations to modern-day TV drama. We will explore a variety of different forms of crime fiction, and how the genre more generally reflects cultural, historical and social issues. The study material for this course will consist of literary texts, TV series, and films drawn from the popular cultural canon. Topics we will discuss include conspiracy, serial crime, trauma, the epistemology of clues, history and crime, and the criminal mind. The course begins with a historical overview of detective fiction and concludes with a creative workshop on how to write a detective story. Students with a taste for murder, crime, and suspense — and above all the desire to solve enigmas and mysteries — are welcome to attend this course.

Date: 19 June 2020 (Friday)
Time: 11:00am Hong Kong Time
Language: English
Speaker: Professor Eli Park Sorensen, Department of English, CUHK
Direct Link: https://youtu.be/UDlbxiiUUWY

Can we predict our English learning ability from our IQ, MBTI, blood type, or zodiac?

Having a good command of English has become indispensable to be successful in academia. Although most students are striving hard to obtain high proficiency in English, it is true that some students seem to be better at learning English than others. What makes the difference? What qualities good language learners commonly have? What can predict good English learning ability? In this mini-lecture, several candidates such as IQ, MBTI, blood type, or even zodiac are examined to see if any of these is strongly related to English learning ability. This lecture will also highlight the importance of scientific approaches to studies in applied English linguistics.

Date: 29 May 2020 (Friday)
Time: 2:30pm Hong Kong Time
Language: English
Speaker: Professor Jung Jookyoung, Department of English, CUHK
Direct Link: https://youtu.be/kaqNUz2Gpbs

Superheroes in Graphic Novel, Comics and Film

Professor Michael O’Sullivan will introduce his course "Superheroes in Graphic Novel, Comics and Film" during the YouTube Live Talk. Below are the course description:

"We are all superheroes at times. Modern superheroes, however, take us back to the gods of ancient Greece. They remind us of the vast potential of human endeavour. This course aims to provide a historical and cultural overview of the genre of superheroes and the Marvel empire. Narratives of superheroes began to circulate in popular culture during the 1930s with the DC comics phenomenon. The visual artistry and matching of illustrations with text and plot produced a uniquely new form of weekly reading material. The development of the Marvel Graphic Novel in the 80s and 90s built on Asian illustrated traditions and forged new relationships between East and West comics and graphics styles. Today, the genre is among the most dominant cultural forms worldwide. This course will introduce you to the comics and graphic novel literary genre. The course will also have a workshop element hosted by an Oscar-nominated animation team and seek graphic and illustrated responses from students. Above all, the course will investigate the role of the superhero. Who is this superhero, or rather what is a superhero? Why does the fantasy of an individual with supernatural powers generate such fascination in modern society? These are some of the answers we will attempt to answer during this course."

Date: 29 May 2020 (Friday)
Time: 11:00am Hong Kong Time
Language: English
Speaker: Professor Michael O’Sullivan, Department of English, CUHK
Direct Link: https://youtu.be/HxvXxupSKoM

Is TikTok tinkering with my brain?

Social media apps like TikTok are designed in a way to get us hooked. The longer we use an app, the more data about us is collected and sold to advertisers, and this means more profit for social media companies. Examining this phenomenon, this talk discusses how the design of these apps, their linguistic and semiotic features, and their algorithms, shape not only our online behaviour, but also our thoughts and emotions. There is a reason Tiktok is addicting, and one way to understand this is how language works in the digital age, in its many different forms.

Professor Ron Darvin of CUHK English Department does research on issues of language and technology use, and teaches the applied English linguistics courses, "Digital literacy as social practice" and "Digital technologies for language learning."

Date: 28 May 2020 (Thursday)
Time: 11:00am Hong Kong Time
Language: English
Speaker: Professor Ron Darvin, Department of English, CUHK
Direct Link: https://youtu.be/uf7hyBc0b1M

"Is Romeo Stupid?"

In this 30min talk, Prof. Julian Lamb will consider Romeo’s famous speech, “But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?” from Act 2 Scene 2. (See: https://www.bartleby.com/70/3822.html) Here, Romeo sees Juliet on her balcony. Perhaps the best way to describe Romeo is this:

Romeo’s passionate love is reflected in the very poetic language he uses to describe Juliet: she is the sun, her eyes are like stars, and her beauty makes the moon envious. These are grand pronouncements indeed, and we are apt to wonder whether Romeo is speaking too passionately about someone he has only just met. Has he lost his mind? Has love made him stupid? And what would it mean for the play if we saw him this way? Come join us as Prof. Lamb tries to answer these questions.

Date: 22 May 2020 (Friday)
Time: 11:00am Hong Kong Time
Language: English
Speaker: Professor Julian Lamb, Department of English, CUHK
Direct Link: https://youtu.be/yTf_KFSL5nQ



All are welcome.
Should you have any questions, please contact the Department of English via email at english-dept@cuhk.edu.hk.

‘O City, city’: Sounding The Waste Land Now

Prof. Hugh Haughton
Department of English & Related Literature
University of York

Date: 6 November 2019 (Wed)
Time: 11:30am
Venue: E-Zone, Room 332, Fung King Hey Building

Abstract:
I will be talking about sound eects and the city, focusing on the noise, music and multiple voices sounded in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which began brewing in Eliot’s brain in London nearly 100 years ago (before publication in late 1922). I will be focusing mainly on Eliot’s ways of conjuring the modern city in its central section, ‘The Fire Sermon’, the heart of its polyvocal, multiply allusive modern soundscape. David Fuller notes that ‘although he had no technical training, music was the art that personally aected Eliot most deeply’, and I want to think of Eliot’s dissonant, metropolitan poem in terms of what the Russian Poet Osip Mandelstam calls the ‘noise of time’, and more specically, the noise of modernity, viewed from now a hundred years on.

Symposium on the Gothic on the Feast of Samhain at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Speakers:
Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Senior Lecturer
(Manchester Metropolitan University)

Prof. Li Ou, Associate Professor
(The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Prof. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Associate Professor
(Hong Kong Baptist University)

Ms. Devaleena Kundu, Assistant Professor
(Christ University, Bangalore, India)

Ms. Liz Wan, Postgraduate Student
(The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Date: 30 Oct 2019 (Wednesday)
Time: 2:00-6:30pm
Venue: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Department of English, E-Zone (Room 332) & Arts Faculty Hub (G24), Fung King Hey Building

Schedule: View here

The Vulgar Fictions of a Demented Irishman’: Postmodern Vampirism and the Cinema of Neil Jordan

Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn
Senior Lecturer
(Manchester Metropolitan University)

Date: 30 Oct 2019 (Wednesday)
Time: 5:30-6:45pm
Venue: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Department of English, Arts Faculty Hub (G24), Fung King Hey Building

Abstract:
John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) initiates two tantalising elements in vampire fiction which continue to inform its postmodern iterations today. The discovery of a terrible secret and the forbidden, if not downright blasphemous, nature of vampirism itself haunts Polidori’s tortured protagonist, Aubrey, and informs the subsequent psychological haunting experienced by the young Englishman, knowing that one day, the vampire Lord Ruthven will return from death. The influential reach of Polidori’s tale has been undermined in popular culture, which often cites Stoker’s Dracula as the fount of 20th century and contemporary vampiric fascination; and yet, contemporary filmmakers, including Neil Jordan, whose cinematic vampires are the subject of my paper, return to numerous themes hinted at and haunting the margins of Polidori’s tale, ruminating on the guilt and terrible burden of vampiric secrets and the dangers of encountering immortals. Jordan’s own vampire films, Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Byzantium (2012), adapted to the screen from Anne Rice’s novel of the same name and Moira Buffini’s play A Vampire Story (2008) respectively, meditate on the horrid nature of immortality as a brutal, masculine force which threatens to strip away and destroy all remnants of emotional and feminine attributes—the lingering domain of humanity in these tales—in its wake. Jordan’s texts foreground a gloomy aesthetic and often beautiful expression of guilt-ridden terror which, alongside the adapted material, includes the return of Lord Ruthven (played by Jonny Lee Miller) in Byzantium to underscore Polidori’s literary legacy. Using Jordan’s films as exemplary vampire films in the Postmodern era, Jordan’s ‘vulgar fictions’ (which dismiss Stoker’s influence) disclose an unpaid debt to Polidori’s tale and Irish folklore, and how influential they have been on Jordan’s own fascination with guilt, blood bonds, and immortality.

Appropriate methodologies for investigating classroom discourse

Prof. Steve Walsh
Newcastle University and The University of Hong Kong

Date: 18 Oct 2019 (Friday)
Time: 11:30am
Venue: E-Zone, Room 332, Fung King Hey Building

Abstract:
The classroom as a site of institutional interaction has been the source of much attention and empirical study. Researchers have struggled for more than forty years in an attempt to capture what is ‘really happening’ in classroom interaction. As Kumaravadivelu (1999:454) observes, classrooms are the ‘crucible where the prime elements of education all mix together’; understanding the interactional processes which come together in that crucible is central to any serious educational research. Latterly, more and more corpora of classroom interaction have emerged and these have been studied in dierent ways, both quantitative and qualitative. In this talk, I evaluate the various approaches to studying corpora of classroom interaction, including conversation analysis, interaction analysis, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. Drawing on empirical classroom interaction data, I will assess the relative merits and shortcomings of the various approaches and look at the ways in which our understandings can dier according to which approach we adopt. I will also scope out the usefulness of combined approaches to analysis so as to appraise which combinations optimise our understanding for educational goals.

Dostoevsky, Consciousness and Romantic Irony

Prof. Paul Fung
Department of English
The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong

Date: 4 Oct 2019 (Friday)
Time: 11:30am
Venue: E-Zone, Room 332, Fung King Hey Building

Abstract:
This paper reconsiders Dostoevsky in relation to Schlegel’s idea of irony, which is based on the premise that the human subject is self-dividing. The romantic imagines to achieve a stable and united self, but that wish is continually shown futile in an innite process of self-reection. Romantic irony therefore is a mode of existence marked by a desire for an organic whole and the realization that such desire is impossible. The Dostoevsky’s hero is thrown to such ironic situation, where human subjectivity is continually conrmed and disconrmed. The paper discusses references to Russian romanticism in Dostoevsky’s writings. It then moves on to a rereading of Notes from Underground. Schlegel’s critical fragments are used throughout to illuminates the ironic quality of Dostoevsky’s writings.

Pausing to Think in English Romanticism

Instructor:
Prof. Christoph Bode
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Date: 21 May 2019 (Tuesday)
Time: 2:00 - 3:30pm
E-Zone, Room 332, Fung King Hey Building

Abstract:
There are many poems in English Romanticism in which situations or moments of pausing to think are thematized or even dramatized, the difference between the two being that when you thematize these moments you can put a temporal distance between yourself now and yourself then and you can try and define the difference it made, but when you try and dramatize the experience in the poem, you write as if you were still in that situation and you pretend to record the changes as they happen.

Now, as we know from Wordsworth's Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, the moment of original emotion is rarely, if ever, identical with the moment of composition, and for very good reasons, too. In this laid-back talk, I will walk you through a series of such poems – poems that in one way or another deal with 'pausing to think' – and I will try and address the following questions: Often, the moment in which you pause to think is not the moment in which what is within you can already be verbalized. How do the poems attend to this matter of bringing thought to language, of the labour of bringing forth the adequate expression ("Could I embody and unbosom now / That which is most within me, – could I wreak / My thoughts upon expression…" Byron, Childe Harold III, 97)? Then, often moments in which you are lost in thought seem to be characterized by an obliteration of the dividing line between subject and object – you are lost in thought and you become forgetful of yourself, while at the same time you can be said to be fully with yourself, forgetful of the world. How is that particular state addressed in these poems? Thirdly, "pausing to think" (an admittedly weak translation of the German Innehalten) is marked by a curious experience of time: on the one hand, the transience of time seems to be suspended, on the other, it seems that you experience time far more intensely than under normal circumstances.

My examples will be taken from William Wordsworth (a carefully selected passage from the Prelude, namely the "Blind Beggar episode"), Samuel Taylor Coleridge ("Frost at Midnight"), and, perhaps not surprisingly, from John Keats ("On First Looking into Chapman's Homer", "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode to Melancholy", "To Autumn"): it is in John Keats, and in his odes in particular, that we find an attempt to write poetry 'to the moment', that is, a poetry that pretends to be a record of time passing this very moment: poetry as a logbook of inner experience.

If we abstract from our readings, we find that the characteristics of the poetry of 'pausing to think' can be subsumed either under temporality or under mediality and in a way that connects the two. The leading questions are these: What happens to time in moments when we pause to think? What happens to time when this experience is put into words to make it communicable? What happens to time when the result of this process of medialization (putting it first into speech, then into print) reaches its final destination, the reader? A tentative explanation of the above-mentioned contradictions – the antinomies that occur once we try and fix the experience of pausing to think in a medium, in language – might be found along the lines of the Kantian antinomies.

The workshop itself should be regarded as a courteous invitation to pause to think. We hope to practice what we preach.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: How German is it?

Speaker:
Prof. Christoph Bode
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Date: 17 May 2019 (Friday)
Time: 11:30 am
Venue: G24, The Arts and Humanities Hub, Fung King Hey Building

Abstract:
The lecture examines how much Germany there is in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It discusses the significance of Ingolstadt, Victor Frankenstein's university and the place where his Creature is actually created; the possible importance of the leading German physiological scientist at the time, Johann Wilhelm Ritter; the unfounded theory that the novel has something to do with Burg Frankenstein near Darmstadt; and it dismisses the idea that the German ghost stories collected in Fantasmagoriana were a kind of source for Mary Shelley. Towards the end, it suggests that Frankenstein is a philosophical novel (much more than Gothic fiction) that systematically sets man and his creation in sceneries that are supreme examples of the Kantian sublime. Frankenstein is read as a novel about a double failure of judgement, viz. in aesthetic and in ethical terms. The dichotomy of 'terror of the soul' vs. 'terror of Germany' is exposed as a specious one.

English Language Studies and the Community of Practice model: Beyond the 'third wave'

Speaker:
Dr. Brian King
School of English
The University of Hong Kong

Date: 26 April 2019 (Friday)
Time: 11:30 am
Venue: E-zone, Room 332, Fung King Hey Building

Abstract:
The first 'language' researchers to engage extensively with the Community of Practice model (CofP) were working in the variationist sector of sociolinguistics (e.g. Eckert, Mendoza-Denton, and others). When I specify extensively, I am pointing to their detailed and early work on the principled use of the theory and the meticulous identification of communities of practice, both of which emerged soon after Lave and Wenger's seminal book (1992) and have been an inspiration for language researchers in many fields. Their methods are well established and robust, and other fields of language study would be well advised to emulate their fastidiousness more consistently. In this presentation, I will 'bring to the table' some fresh perspectives about the use of the CofP model beyond variationist research, including research in discourse analysis and English language learning, highlighting some instructive cases. Much remains to be explored in relation to the CofP in language research. Modes of belonging and the status of the practices being identified both need more nuanced attention because insights can 'fall off the radar' when the researcher's field of view is too narrow. Finally, with the intersectional turn we see that the CofP model is well positioned to take us forwards, which is an exciting prospect indeed.

Towards English as an international language: The evolving English language curricula, examination papers and textbooks in Hong Kong (1975-2016)

Speaker:
Dr. Jim Chan
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Education
The University of Hong Kong

Date: 12 April 2019 (Friday)
Time: 11:30 am
Venue: E-zone, Room 332, Fung King Hey Building

Abstract:
This study explores how theories and recommendations in the World Englishes (WE) and English as a lingua franca (ELF) literature over the past 40 years (1975-2016) have been translated into English language teaching (ELT) curricula, speaking and listening examination papers and textbooks in Hong Kong in three key areas, namely, (1) language standards, norms and models, (2) language and intercultural awareness and (3) strategies for international/intercultural communication. Based on qualitative and quantitative content analysis, the findings suggest that WE/ELF research has guided Hong Kong’s English language education mainly by accommodating to the changing role of English (from a colonial to an international language) and the evolving language use contexts in Hong Kong, but there has been little engagement with the pluricentric view of language varieties and variation. Specifically, the changes in the curricula, examination papers and textbooks suggest an attempt to raise students’ awareness of different cultures and real-life language use situations, but they fail to reveal the complex nature of contemporary English and international/intercultural communication. Furthermore, the textbook design appears to lag behind the recommendations of the corresponding curricula. Considering the incremental theory-to-practice process, the paper concludes by offering suggestions to initiate subtle changes that could better accommodate WE/ELF recommendations in the ELT development worldwide.

Bio:
Dr. Jim Chan is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education in the University of Hong Kong and was previously a Chemistry and English teacher in secondary and tertiary education in Hong Kong. His research interests include world Englishes, English as a lingua franca, language policy, curriculum and teaching, and language attitudes. Some of his recent work has been published in TESOL Quarterly, World Englishes, International Journal of Applied Linguistic, System, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Language and Education, Asian Englishes, and Journal of English as a lingua franca.

Tragedy Writ Small: C. L. R. James and
the Re-imagination of the Political

Speaker:
Dr. Anjuli I. Gunaratne
Postdoctoral Fellow
Society of Fellows in the Humanities
The University of Hong Kong

Date: 29 March 2019
Time: 11:30 am
Venue: E-zone, Room 332, Fung King Hey Building

Abstract:
The primary focus of this talk will be to rethink C. L. R. James’s idea of tragedy and the tragic. Since the publication of David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Enlightenment, it has become common to read James’s aesthetic and political formulation of tragedy as the postcolonial corrective to anticolonialism’s frustrated longing for total revolution. But reading James’s preoccupation with tragedy primarily as a critique of anticolonialism’s investment in the revolutionary ideals of the Enlightenment not only over-generalizes anticolonialism, it also obscures how this particular preoccupation of James’s enabled him to represent the process of decolonisation as already tragic, even before it was deemed unsuccessful. In other words, decolonisation had always been thought of in relation to its own loss even before such a loss had been conrmed.

Detracting from the binary opposition Scott creates between anticolonial Romances and postcolonial Tragedies, this talk will attend to how loss, and not failure, comes to dene James’s formulation of a tragic aesthetics and politics. It will also seek to rene this reconsidered view of Jamesian tragedy by paying attention to how this tragedy comes to be shaped not by a single failure but in fact by losses that resist all denition, quantitative or even qualitative; they are losses—neither exclusively personal nor political—that, to use Sylvia Wynter’s words, “cannot be cut,” which speaks to loss that cannot be properly mourned. Minor and unnecessarily melancholic though these losses might seem in the face of colossal revolutionary failure, they help us to rethink the poetics of what has come to be known as postcolonial tragedy outside the ideological and narratological concerns of total revolution.

ENGE1000 English Studies: Thinking Creatively in A Global Language

Orientation Day for Undergraduate Admissions

Date: 20 October 2018
Admission: All are welcome

Exhibition and Booth	8:30am – 6:00pm	G/F Lobby, Esther Lee Building, Chung Chi College
Academic Counselling Session	10:00am – 10:30am 11:30am – 12:00noon 1:30pm – 2:00pm 3:00pm – 3:30pm	Sin Wai Kin Hall (LT1), G/F, Esther Lee Building, Chung Chi College

Event Details:
Website: http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/oday

Melon HK, 2018 by Gabrielle TSUI

Melon HK, 2018
(Saturday 17 March, 2018 @ JW Marriott, Admiralty)
By Gabrielle TSUI

Sometimes, being an English major isn’t just about surrounding yourself with poetry and literary essays. Sometimes, the literary arts and the hard sciences aren’t so mutually exclusive. At Melon: Sci-Fi and Beyond – a conference dedicated science fiction and science fact – I got to see the wonderful intersection of science and the literary, with keynotes and panels ranging from discussions on novel writing to genetic manipulation, from how publishing has changed over the years to the development of artificial intelligence.

Sometimes, then, as an English major you get the awesome chance to talk about space, aliens, biological manipulation, artificial intelligence, and the commercial reality of content creation. Thanks to one of our professors, some English majors like myself had the chance to attend this science fiction conference which boasted both creative talents and international industry experts.

Melon 2018 kicked off with an introduction from science fiction veteran Allen Steele, who gave a rundown of the genre and its influences, and from 9:00 in the morning to 5:00 in the afternoon, a function room at the JW Marriott Hotel was abuzz with questions being asked and minds being blown by authors, investors, astrophysicists, filmmakers, astronomers, and lawyers alike.

Think: How will artificial intelligence develop? Will it eventually take over the world? How can human beings evolve to explore deep space? How does science fiction make money in our commercial reality? Did science fiction really influence scientific development? How does the industry of content creation in China differ from the America? Do we need scientific knowledge in order to write a compelling scientific universe, or is it our personal experiences that shape these fictional worlds? How do we get our work published these days? And most importantly, what about the ALIENS? Where are the aliens…?!

Over endless coffee and a stunning lunch buffet, these questions were scrutinized in great detail. It was a room full of knowledge and wit: Locus Award winner Yoon Ha Lee reflected on how his transsexual experiences are presented within the realm of science fiction; senior astronomer Seth Shostak called in from the SETI institute to cheerfully bring us up to speed on his search for ET; Hong Kong-based film producer Derek Ting discussed Asian representation in film and drew inspiration from the recent superhero blockbuster Black Panther; and Arthur C. Clark Award-nominated author Becky Chambers talked about making the future relatable and something worth looking forward to in her novels.

Sometimes, as an English major you get to be in the room where it happens, and then you leave it with a notebook filled with scribbled notes, your fingertips electric with new ideas. Astrophysicist Hilke Schlichting said, “Science fiction ... is like a thought experiment for real life scientists.” And as English majors, we know that while works of literature are the result of external happenings and real world developments, literature can also be the spark that lights the flames of change.

For me, it was Allen Steele who summed up perfectly the significance of literature to our present technological world. “Look at the older works of science fiction,” he said, “and you’ll see the ideas that have shaped the 21st century…”

It seems literature really might be central to this scientific world of ours.

(Special thanks to Professor Grant Hamilton for the opportunity and tickets to attend Melon HK, 2018)