This course examines how media per se became a problem and an attraction in a specific historical and cultural context. In China, it happened when the space of emotion took a new form of interface, hence heightening the attention to the encounter, confrontation, and crossover among forms of medium at the turn of the seventeenth-century. Artisans experimented with framing one medium with another, publishers established more complex relationships between text and pictures, playwrights wrote musical plays for silent consumption on page, and fictional narratives self-reflexively dramatized what diverse effects the same story would have if presented in different mediums. Our central text is the early 19th century novel 鏡花緣, but we also trace back all the way into early and medieval periods and see how this notion of medium has revised our understanding of oral, manuscript, print, theater, and visual culture in other historical moments. Conceptually, we bring in theoretical tools from media studies as well as from the philosophy of technology.