The advent of Chinese literary modernity is often associated with the introduction of the modern vernacular language in the early twentieth century. This process, however, was preceded and augmented by a fundamental restructuring of prevailing genre hierarchies, as well as the gradual institutionalization of new systems for the categorization of cultural production. In this seminar, we will familiarize ourselves with various 'genres' of genre theory, while undertaking a concurrent exploration of how genre has worked to constitute new infrastructures for reading and writing in the early twentieth century. The course will culminate with a series of case studies of particular intermedial genres understood as local and contingent inflections of transnationally circulating forms through which the experience of modernity has been mediated.