The Value of English Literary Studies in Hong Kong: Insights from Interviews with MA Students

Positioning modernist texts in the English department in Hong Kong: From ‘planetary’ modernisms to ‘planetary’ pedagogies?

“…Yet the hardhitting pragmatism and materialism in the (post)capitalist megacity of Hong Kong may precisely—and ironically—explain the unique appeal of modernist studies Hong Kong. I have used student interview responses from a modernism course offered by a department of English at a Hong Kong university in order to explore students' perceptions of what that is attractive about modernist studies to them (Chan, 2016). The result was that the anti‐pragmatism of literary studies—and in this case modernist studies—proved to be precisely the most important value of such studies to students, as this allowed them to pursue wider possibilities for deeper understanding of the self and society (concrete effects that, in a different sense, can also be considered ‘pragmatic’), instead of only focussing on the immediate instrumentalism of language learning.…”