Karl Manis

I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. My research interests include contemporary literature, media theory, and mutlimedial reading practices. I have recently taught 20th and 21st century literatures; critical theory; and literary approaches to sound and music. I have also worked as an educational developer, designing pedagogical training for graduate student teachers across disciplines.

My dissertation, "Embedded Media: Technologies of Reading in Contemporary Literature," explores how recent novels depict practices of reading in media-rich environments, and how literary or novelistic reading informs and is informed by other forms of storytelling (e.g., comics, video games, movies). I propose an update to deconstructive/poststructuralist accounts of reading to accommodate the material acts and affects entangled with technological mediation. My essay on the affinity between visually embedded sounds and the fleeting present was recently published in Critique, and I am currently revising an essay on contemporary feminist metafiction and the materiality of reading. 

In Fall 2023, I will begin a postdoctoral fellowship in Literature and Data Science at U of T, where my teaching and research will examine computational and digital approaches to the study of literature. 

List of Publications

“Sounds of the Contemporary: Listening to the Present in Richard McGuire’s Here.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (online), Fall 2022. 

Rev. of Are We Postmodern Yet? And Were We Ever? by Reinhold Kramer. University of Toronto Quarterly 91.3 (summer 2022), pp. 262-64.