Applicable to students admitted in 2003-2004 and thereafter

A. Coursework Requirement

Students are required to complete a minimum of 24 units of courses for graduation.

B. Other Requirements

1. IT Proficiency Test. (Please refer to "Student IT Competence")
   
2. Students are required to submit a research thesis and pass an oral examination for graduation.
   
3. The thesis should involve texts in English unless strong justification for their exclusion be presented to the Graduate Panel. Texts are defi ned as language, literature, or culture-related texts.
   
4. Complete an Improving Postgraduate Learning (IPL) module on "Observing Intellectual Property and Copyright Law during Research". This will be an online module and relevant information can be accessed from the website: www.cuhk.edu.hk/clear/programmes/programmes.htm.
   

C. Remarks

1. Full-time and part-time students must complete at least 15 units at the end of the second and third term respectively.

2. Full-time students are required to submit a formal thesis proposal in early May of the second term; part-time students are requested to do so at the beginning of the third term. They are allowed no more than two attempts in applying for the formal approval of their proposal by the Graduate Panel. Any second attempt must come within one month of the first one.

The course aims at providing the students with an orientation of critical and interpretiveapproaches required of graduate studies in literature in a cross-cultural context. Various literary and critical paradigms from Western and Chinese traditions will be reviewed with a discussion of the basic issues in interpretation theory and criticism. The course will also focus on the implications of recent orientations in social sciences and philosophy for literary studies. Students will be required to identify their own research interests and pursue textbased case studies on problems or topics in criticism and interpretive theory that are involved in the interdisciplinary studies of literature.

Specific area(s) of investigation will be defined every year to cover one or more of the following aspects in the critical and comparative studies of literary genre: poetics, prosaics; dramatic theories; narrative theories; questions of form and structure; issues in theme and style; concepts of character and hero; problems of generic convention and institution; as well as other topics related to the study of particular genres or subgenres of poetry, drama and fiction. Emphasis will be put on the dialectic between theory and practice. Textual analysis will be treated in relation to the critical investigation of possible cultural and historical contexts.

Subject to the approval of the Division Head, students are allowed to take the above course more than once and gain the units each time they pass the course. However, students cannot take courses with the same course code more than once in a single term.

Specific area(s) of investigation will be defined every year to cover one or more of the following aspects in the critical and comparative studies of literary history: influence and reception; period and movement; literary ideas and intellectual history; historicism;neohistoricism; classicism; neo-classicism; romanticism; symbolism; realism; modernism; postmodernism; functions and theories of literary history; perspectives of historical criticism; concepts of literary tradition; concepts of literary system; literary history and literary reception; feminist perspectives; materialist perspectives; problems of textuality and intertextuality. The chosen area(s) of investigation will use texts from all three major genresof poetry, drama, and fiction.

Subject to the approval of the Division Head, students are allowed to take the above course more than once and gain the units each time they pass the course. However, students cannot take courses with the same course code more than once in a single term.

This course is designed to investigate areas of specialisation normally not covered under generic studies or literary history. It may involve any one of the following areas in the comparative and interdisciplinary studies of literature: thematology, textual criticism and reader response, aesthetics, Western critical theories and Chinese literary studies, problems in the histories of literary criticism; twentieth-century critical theories; literature and the other arts; literature and sociology; literature and philosophy; literature and history; literatureand language; literature and culture.

Subject to the approval of the Division Head, students are allowed to take the above course more than once and gain the units each time they pass the course. However, students cannot take courses with the same course code more than once in a single term..