Foreword I’m delighted to announce the publication of an important volume from the University of Mississippi Press, Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty Twenty-First-Century Approaches, which includes an essay of mine about teaching Eudora Welty in Hong Kong, with direct and attributed input (discourse, photos, storyboards, and images) from some remarkable young people who helped me…
Category: research
“English in Hong Kong: Usage and Attitudes: A Survey” by Robert Fuchs
We are interested in when people in Hong Kong use English and what their attitudes to using English in certain contexts are. If you live in Hong Kong, no matter your level of English, nationality, origin and birthplace, we invite you to share your opinions with us and complete the survey at http://bit.ly/HKEnglish2018. The survey is…
“The Archive of Asian Sounds in English Poetry: First Recordings” by Lian-Hee Wee
For much of the world touched by the cultural spread of English that began with the age of exploration in the west to the rise of the United States following the Second World War, the language of prestige is a twisted dilemma of what is foreign and what has become also indigenised. Students of English…
Announcement: Outstanding ENG and ENGED students 2017-2018
Congratulations to these outstanding ENG and ENGED students! Pictured here with Professor Lian-Hee Wee (ENG), Dr Tammy Ho Lai-Ming (ENG) and Professor Johnny Poon (Acting Dean, Faculty of Arts). The Outstanding Students Presentation was held on Friday 29 September 2017 to recognise Arts Faculty’s high-achieving students with awards in outstanding academic performance, outstanding achievement, outstanding…
“Gender Studies Concentration” @ HKBU
Gender Studies Concentration (GSC) at Hong Kong Baptist University is the first of its kind in Hong Kong. It consists of 21 units co-offered by the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Social Sciences. GSC aims at delivering a unique opportunity for students to add breadth to their major studies, through being exposed…
Announcement: Jessica Yeung Wins Postgraduate Bursary of the British Comparative Literature Association
In May this year, Jessica Yeung submitted an application to the British Comparative Literature Association Postgraduate Bursary scheme for attending the conference “World Literature and Global Core Texts”, to be held on 26-27 June 2017 in the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). She applied for this scheme because she was encouraged by another…
Announcement: The Seventeenth Workshop on Cantonese
日期: 2017 年 4 月 22 日 (星期六) 地點: 香港浸會大學, 思齊樓, 719 主題: 粵難粵學 Date: April 22, 2017 (Saturday) Venue: David C. Lam Building (DLB) 719, Hong Kong Baptist University Theme: The Teaching and Learning of Cantonese as an Additional Language “The Seventeenth Workshop on Cantonese” will take place on April 22, 2017 (Saturday) at…
“The Broken One” by Naterlie Ip, by Christy Leung, Leo Lau and Charis Yeung
Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from a longer adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944). . (Laura stands at the centre of the stage. Tom and Amanda enter the stage and stand at either sides of Laura. All three solemnly face the audience. Amanda is spotlit.) Amanda: It was the first and last time…
“Comics and Graphic Narratives; or, The Art of the Matter” by Jason S Polley
The fourth-year English course “Comics and Graphic Narratives”, a title as ambiguous as, say, “Short Stories and Novels”, and even the more equivocal “Prose Fiction”, is organised into several unstable thematic groupings: underground comics (or comix), revisionist narratives within the mainstream, memoirs & confessionals, new journalism, and auteur comics. The texts most recently selected for…
“A Secret About a Secret About a Secret” by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming
Jo Shapcott’s poem “Myself Photographed” begins with an affirmative statement: “So this is me.” This line draws our attention to the subject of the photograph, although it does so with a slightly wry, or perhaps uncertain, tone provided by the word “So.” The next line, “In the field after we got lost,” continues this tone,…
“Who Speaks?: From Self-Fictionalising Authors to Empowered Readers” by Janet Lau
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. ― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down. ―David Foster Wallace, The Pale…
“Mu Dan and Ambiguity” by Candy Wang
Mu Dan’s (1918-1977) poems, while incorporating elements and sentiments of classical Chinese poetry, also exhibit characteristics of Western modernist aesthetics and thoughts. For example, his poetry was influenced by William Empson (1906-1984), and this influence partially ushered Mu Dan’s shift towards Modernism. Perhaps the most significant impact of Empson on Mu Dan’s poetry was the…
“What are we?—A Journey in Search of Identity in Hong Kong Literature” by Englebert Tse
A speech given at the Opening Ceremony of the Academic Week on 31 October 2016 Professors and student representatives, good afternoon. On behalf of my cabinet, I am delighted to have you here to participate in this Academic Week hosted by the English Language and Literature Society. The theme of this year’s Academic Week focuses…
“The Surrealist Art of Remedios Varo” by Anna Tham
Remedios Varo’s interest in nature draws on the idea that it inspires us to think of the world in relation to instinct and spirituality and that it also represents the part of the human mind which is not normally known—the unconscious, as represented in the universal emotions stimulated by the concept of nature. Adam Adamski…
A Reading of C.P. Cavafy’s “Candles” by Nicola Chan Oi Ching
“The Penitent Magdalen” (detail) by Georges de la Tour C.P. Cavafy in “Candles” (1984), regarded by himself as ‘one of the best things [he] ever wrote’ (Cavafy qtd. in Liddell 139), transforms the abstract conception of daily birth of life into a metaphorical image of a row of candles, in which the first-person persona’s past and…
Announcement: Ivan Delazari wins Best Graduate Student Essay competition held by the International Society for the Study of Narrative
Returning to Hong Kong after his June tour of two public lectures in St. Petersburg and international conference appearances in Helsinki and Amsterdam, Ivan Delazari submitted his essay, “Diegetic Music: Who Is Listening, and What Is Heard?”, to the Best Graduate Student Essay competition held by the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) as…
Announcement: Robert Fuchs awarded the Richard M. Hogg Prize
Robert Fuchs, new Research Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, will be awarded the prestigious Richard M. Hogg Prize of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) for his paper entitled “Near-Mergers in Postcolonial Varieties of English – The /v/-/w/ Contrast in Educated Indian English”. Robert will receive the prize at the annual…
Announcement: Stuart Christie appointed Editor-in-Chief of Literature Compass
Stuart Christie, Head and Professor of the Department of English Language and Literature, was recently appointed by international publisher John Wiley & Sons as Editor-in-Chief for its international academic journal Literature Compass. Stuart is pleased with the appointment, he said: “I’m very grateful for the opportunity a reputable publisher like Wiley has given me to help…
Announcement: Ruth Hung Received the Faculty/School Performance Award for Young Researcher
Dr Ruth YY Hung (洪如蕊) has been given the Faculty/School Performance Award for Young Researcher by Professor Franklin Luk, Vice-President (Academic) on 29 April 2016. (April 2016)
Announcement: Six ENG students presented their Hon Pro research at the Community College of City University
On Thursday 21 April 2016, six students from the Department of English presented their Honours Project research at the Community College of City University. The presentation was part of a two-day annual student conference held on the CityU campus, organised by Derrick Stone. Chan Man Kwan Ashley Hui Hon Man Herman Kwok Wai Yin Olivia…
Announcement: Zabrina Lo awarded CY Tung Scholarship to join Spring 2016 voyage of Semester at Sea
Pictured: Zabrina Lo (right) with Jason S Polley, who recommended Zabrina for the scholarship Zabrina Lo (English Language and Literature, Year 3), co-editor of Department of English’s Edge: HKBU Creative Journal and the First Prize Winner of the English Poetry Contest 2015, has been awarded the CY Tung Scholarship to spend a semester on the…
“A Creative Response to the 3rd Movement of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony” by Holden Liang Qichao, with Ivan Delazari
I saw a movie, in cold blue and dark grey colors (film-noirish, dark palette, like at dusk but with no street lights or any artificial light). A woman was running through a labyrinth of streets, looking like Hong Kong (small alleys, lots of cables and laundry lines, the ground wet), with her face towards us, the camera moving backwards in…
“Julia” by Stuart Christie
Julia, you recall, was Winston Smith’s great love in George Orwell’s 1984. She is both a character in the book and, at least for me, an emblem of what disinterested love itself can, and often does, result in just prior to the moment of capture, just prior to the moment the repressive secret police (of…
Alumni News: Viggo Cheng
Viggo Cheng (鄭浩輝), BA, English (Class of 2012)/MA, Language Studies (Class of 2014) has been awarded a postgraduate student assistantship to pursue PhD studies in Sociolinguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Renewable for up to five years, the assistantship (covering tuition and health insurance) will allow Viggo to pursue research in his areas of…
“The Controversy of “We are All Chinese”” by Ruth Y.Y. Hung
《無間道-「我想要回身份」》, 磁漆布本 Infernal Affairs, “I want my identity back”, enamel paint on canvas, 100cm(H) x 150cm(W), 2007 [Via.] Nearly two decades after the Handover of 1997, the PRC and its SAR HK have not come closer though the latter has become increasingly dependent on the booming mainland economy. Early this year, the 34-year-old local star Ella…
“Conference Reflections: The 22nd Annual Conference of the English and American Literature Association” by Jessica Siu-yin Yeung
. My Paper A look at literature will show readers that many literary texts deal with characters’ incessant quest for happiness through various means. A prime example is Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998). By making special reference to Mrs Dalloway written by Virginia Woolf in 1925, Cunningham uses her novel to link the quests for…
“What is Professional Discourse?” by Kenneth Kong
The following is from the first chapter of Professional Discourse: What does it mean to be a professional? What does a professional do to distinguish themselves from laymen and other professionals? To many people, being a professional means a degree from a medical school, many years of experience in an occupation or even just an…
“Intersection Collaborative Learning Project” — A Showcase of the Best Works (with an introduction by Heidi Huang and Holden Liang Qichao)
This month, students from the English Department’s Master’s programme in Literary and Comparative Studies (MALCS) joined the students from the undergraduate course Hong Kong Stories (taught by Heidi Huang) in an “Intersection Collaborative Learning Project”. The collaborative field trip which they undertook throughout Hong Kong was inspired by local modernist writer Liu Yichang’s short story…
Announcement: Kenneth Kong’s Professional Discourse Published
Dr Kenneth Kong has recently published his monograph, Professional Discourse, with Cambridge University Press (2014). Using a wide range of professional genres (such as research papers, business reports, performance commentaries, guidebooks and legal documents) Professional Discourse focuses on the discourse of professional writing, employing analytic paradigms from systemic-functional linguistics, pragmatics, text analysis, sociology and anthropological…
“Zhang Longxi on World Literature” by James Au
I first heard of Professor Zhang Longxi in Dr. Heidi Huang’s lecture. She introduced his article “The True Face of Mount Lu: On the Significance of Perspectives and Paradigms”, which I found truly impressive. In that article, Zhang mentions the importance of not analysing anything from only one perspective and suggests one trying to read from…
