The aim of this course is to familiarise students with the dialogic relationships between modern Chinese literature and Chinese film from a historical perspective. Thematically organised, this class will help students understand the development of both literature and film in modern China by discussing such key issues as aesthetic presuppositions, temporal and spatial settings and interpretative strategies.The sub-theme of this year’s course is the hometowns of words. What is a hometown? Is it always a place of birth? What are the relations between writers and their hometowns, real or imagined? Where are the old and new literary hometowns of global Chinese literature? How do these spaces and places condition literary productions, register historical events, and reveal socio-cultural transformations? How do they index our feelings of nostalgia, anxiety, loss, and more? Starting with these questions, this survey course invites students to embark on a journey to travel across different lands of global China and the Sinophone world from the Mainland to Taiwan, Hong Kong to the South Seas, central plains to the borderlands, and the Earth to the cosmos. While mapping the literary cartography, the course also functions as a gateway to introduce modern and contemporary Chinese and Sinophone culture and history in the 20th and 21st centuries. From traditional socialist realist fiction to sci-fi, from gender perspectives to queer voices, from environmental literature to articulations of the nonhuman, the course covers a wide range of writers who write at/about/away from home. On this journey, the analytical and theoretical writings of the leading scholars of the field will also be discussed. For each week, a film is also assigned as supplementary material. The secondary readings are all in English.