余君偉教授

Language Enhancement at EdUHK and Beyond: Fostering a Community of Practice on Technology-enhanced Language Learning and Teaching
This project intends to achieve the following objectives: 1). Identify creative and effective use of technologies in language learning and teaching (English / Cantonese / Putonghua / other modern languages); 2). Investigate how such technologies help to enhance students’ language learning and teachers’ language teaching through guided self-reflection and critical evaluations of their technology-enhanced language learning/teaching practices; 3). Build a Community of Practice on technology-enhanced language learning and teaching among tertiary students and academic/teaching staff and motivate them to use technologies in language learning and teaching; 4). Discuss language learning related issues (e.g., English/Chinese academic writing, corpus-based language learning, etc.) and offer pedagogical suggestions on technology-enhanced language learning and teaching for both students and teachers; 5). Sustain the community members’ interests in using technologies in language learning and teaching through regular sharing of members’ successful experiences and invited talks given by local and overseas experts in the field of technology enhanced language learning and teaching, and through the organization of an international conference on technology-enhanced language learning and teaching.
Project Start Year : 2020

Chief Investigator(s) : WANG, Lixun 王立勛   (Prof YU, Kwan Wai Eric 余君偉 as Co-Principal Investigator)

Engaging Everyday Modernity: Hong Kong Poetry in the 1970s
The project investigates the poetic treatments of everyday modernity in 1970s Hong Kong, focusing on the thematic nuances and literary styles concerned in the wider context of the rapidly changing local society.
Project Start Year : 2016

Chief Investigator(s) : YU, Kwan Wai Eric 余君偉

Love and Death in Popular Cinema
Love and death are two of the most important human concerns and also two closely related themes in literary and cultural studies. Although there have been quite a few notable book-length studies of love and death in literature, a comprehensive approach to both themes in the cinema with a view to exploring their subtle interconnections has yet to be conducted. To narrow down the scope in consideration of manageability, this project targets specifically at the representations of love and death in popular Hollywood and Asian films, and by ‘Asian’ the corpus of studies is further limited mainly to Hong Kong, Japanese and South Korean productions. Rendered below are 4 major topics covered by this research, and the objectives of this project are to explicate these 4 different themes in depth and to explore any interrelationships among them – 1) the rhetoric of love 2) love, death, and time travel 3) obsession, mourning, and materiality 4) ghost lovers
Project Start Year : 2012

Chief Investigator(s) : YU, Kwan Wai Eric 余君偉

The Generic Features of Wuxia Film and the Problem of Transculturation (funded by National Science Council).
Wuxia film is a major genre in Chinese-language cinema. Although wuxia production in the last decade can hardly rival the golden age of the 1960s, because of transnational cooperation in terms of capital, talents and so forth some recent big-budget wuxia films enjoyed great success and became classic examples of the globalization of the film industry. This proposed study of the wuxia genre is divided into 2 stages as follows – I. The initial stage: studying the evolving generic features of the genre My focuses will fall on: a) 3 classic scenes: namely, the bamboo grove fight, encounter in an inn, and the duel b) The historical development of cinematic skills and related technologies: focusing on the classic scenes below, I will trace such developments from the 1960s to the late 1990s, including in my research will be such things as mise-en-scene, special effects and other technological aspects of film making (including those found in post-production) c) Narrative structure: a preliminary structuralist approach followed by a more poststructuralist and psychoanalytically-informed exploration of the curious “narrative logic” involved d) Themes: of the various themes I will pay particular attention to the idea of “xia” or chivalry, detailing the changing meanings concerned in the wake of East-West cultural conflict and interchange II. The difficulty of “transculturation” I am especially interested in how, because of differences in aesthetics and ideologies, a wuxia film cannot circulate freely across cultural boundaries. Having worked out the generic features of the genre, I will examine the success or failure of a number of post-Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon wuxia films which deliberately aim at a more global audience. Through such examples, I wish to find out what aesthetic and cultural factors account for the facility and which for the difficulty of transnational filmic circulation. I hope my concrete examples in reception will contribute to the often abstract and theoretically-oriented current debates on globalization of the cultural industry.
Project Start Year : 2011

Chief Investigator(s) : YU, Kwan Wai Eric 余君偉

Travel, Ethics, and Genre: Emily Hahn's Travel Writings (funded by National Science Council).
The object of this study is the travel writing in four books by Emily Hahn (1905-1997), “a great lost American literary treasure,” according to The New Yorker. This project includes two different and yet ultimately related aspects. One is the so-called “ethics of travel,” a term borrowed from Syed Manzurul Islam, which encompasses two different dimensions. The first focuses on the moral difficulties and ethical challenges facing the traveling subject when encountering a very different culture. While the traveler may strongly feel such predicaments or repress them thanks to psychological defense mechanisms, we as critics might also be puzzled by the difficulties concerned, though we might be inspired to explore the ethical nuances of the knotty issues concerned and gain some insights not readily available to the traveler. When we suspect that the traveler-narrator is lying in a part of his or her travelogue and wonder if such breaches of truthfulness entails something immoral, then our discussion of the “ethics of travels” has already departed from the more conventional kind of thematic or content studies and moved to a “meta-level” concerning different writing styles, generic norms, and the development of travel literature in history. This project seeks especially to explore the second kind of “ethics of travel,” that is, the ethical implications of travel writing as such. This concern goes well with my persistent interest in the changing writing style in the history of Western travel literature. Using Hahn’s writing in the 1930s and 40s as a prime example, I wish to sketch the developmental trends of travel literature from the more scientific, realistic kind in the nineteenth century, through a kind of more “literary” mode still adhering to Realist conventions, to the more recent “postmodern” writing which deliberately confuses fiction and reality. Furthermore, I wish to probe into some ethical significance and aesthetic effects of the various writing styles which defy the earlier norms.
Project Start Year : 2010

Chief Investigator(s) : YU, Kwan Wai Eric 余君偉

Popular Film Genres, Cultural Translation and Guilty Pleasures: Studies in Hitman and Undercover Films (funded by National Science Council).
This is a two-year project on gangster and crime films, focusing on hitman films and undercover films respectively. The main object of enquiry is Asian films, particularly Hong Kong productions, with an emphasis on cross-cultural contacts and generic exchange. The hitman and the undercover agent are two of the most marginal figures in the gangster and crime genre. As members of the gang world, they are feared and despised by the public and may try to hide their true identities in front of ordinary people. They may be harassed and even harmed by the police owing to their gangster identity; inside the underworld, they may as well be betrayed and prosecuted by fellow gangsters. In short, they find themselves at the interstice between the society of law and the land ruled by gangsters, where they are like walking on a tightrope and may fall at any moment. The goal of my project is two-folded. I begin with the basic work of finding out the generic features of the two “sub-genres” in terms of form (iconography, plot structure, etc) and content (usual themes and motifs). Then I will explore the deeper aesthetic significance and social meanings of each. * The first year: hitman films 1) Dress code, weaponry and masculinities -- Discuss how the dress code and the mastery of weapons and skills of killing help construct the hitman’s masculinity. Investigate the relation between such iconographic features as the shots showing the “caressing” of guns and murders scenes and the hitman’s professionalism which entails some sort of asceticism. 2) The spectator’s guilty pleasures and ethical concerns – Discuss what other forms of pleasure such films offer, in addition to the sadistic pleasure of identifying with the merciless killings. 3) Generic exchange and cultural translation – Discuss how in the wake of cross-cultural generic exchange, new meanings are born in new local contexts. * The second year: undercover films 1) Define the generic feature of Hong Kong undercover films, exploring their relations with Hollywood crime films and looking for incidences of cultural translation. 2) Discuss the conflict between the police work ethic and the gangster in regard to the undercover agent’s identity crisis. Explore various forms of viewer’s pleasures in undercover films.
Project Start Year : 2008

Chief Investigator(s) : YU, Kwan Wai Eric 余君偉

The Tourist, the Flaneur, and Self-Reflexivity in Travel Literature: A Theoretical Enquiry (funded by National Science Council).
The “tourist” and the “traveler” is a pair of important binary opposites in travel culture. The former is imbued with such derogatory meanings as superficiality, routines, and mass consumptions, while the latter implies adventures, individuality, cultivation, and growth or enlightenment through traveling. This distinction is more a matter of how an individual traveler makes sense of the meaning of one’s own travel than of objectivity reality. In his sociological study of tourism, John Urry has put forth the famous theory of the “tourist gaze,” emphasizing the centrality of visual consumption in contemporary tourism. To Urry, the flaneur roaming the nineteenth century Paris prefigured the modern tourist. Yet in the fields of urban studies and literary criticism, critics have made use of Walter Benjamin’s theory of flanerie to promote a kind of positive way of urban spatial practice – wandering and observing the familiar cityscape with a critical eye, catching the ephemeral events in the guise of leisurely stroll in defiance of the capitalist logic of hard work and addictive consumption. Urry also points out that ever since the 1980s, the tourist industry has gradually turned from standardized Fordist mass tourism toward much more diversified and individualized post-Fordism. I claim that the recent surge of in-depth, personalized travel guidebooks are indeed part of this post-Fordist, postmodern tendency. One also sees such traits as the blurring of the distinction between “high” literary travelogues and “low” travel guidebooks, and the rise of self-consciousness and self-reflexivity in travel writing, such as the appearance of meta-travel writings. My concern is not “postmodernism” per se but contemporary travel writers’ self-reflexivity regarding the history of travel and travel writing (including the recent generic changes). I argue that contemporary writers must be keenly aware of the rise of in-depth guidebooks and related TV programs. In order to retain their authority or reliability, they feel an urgent need to go beyond the “mere tourist” and compete with the travel “professionals.” In this light, I wish my theoretical discussion of the various meanings and practices of tourists and flaneurs might offer a new perspective to study how contemporary writers travel and write about their travel experience. My particular focus will fall on how travelers (whether labeled tourists or flaneurs) watch and make sense of what they see while walking the city and with what purposes or attitudes.
Project Start Year : 2007

Chief Investigator(s) : YU, Kwan Wai Eric 余君偉