What’s the Vibe?: Reading, Affect, and the Value of Unreadability
Cultural Studies Salon Seminar with Dr. Karl Manis
Event Details
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Thursday, March 19, 2026
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
City: Peterborough
Traill College
Building: Wallis Hall
Room: 102
Daily headlines testify that reading is under threat: by the information deluge, cuts to (higher) education, the neoliberal cult of efficiency, large language models. Computational media increasingly promise to organize, curate, and customize today’s overwhelming torrents of content so you don’t have to! Yet even as generative AI tools promise mastery of large datasets, blackboxed product design and big data at scale suggest that legibility outstrips human modes and scales of comprehension. If “reading” can be said to describe some kind of commensurate encounter with symbolic material, what forms of encounter are possible with today’s mass quantities of data? Maybe a corrective to all this scaling up is to scale down. In this seminar, I want to consider the critical value of unreadability—not as a symptom of the sheer amount of information out there, but as a localized, affective quality of mediated encounter. How might we recuperate “unreadable” qualities of reading that can’t be quantified, tagged, or subsumed into concise summaries and predictive models? We’ll look at a range of fiction and theory where practices of reading seem to hesitate somewhere between a fantasy of mastery and a hopeful, messy incomprehensibility. I propose the concept of “vibe” as a way of describing the uncertain, inarticulable, embodied qualities of reading that elude capture. What’s the vibe of texts, and how might it help us tune into the irreducible atmosphere of reading?
Karl Manis is an assistant professor (LTA) of Media Studies at Trent University Durham, where he teaches cinema, media history, and digital culture. His research examines the overlaps and tensions between aesthetic experience and technology, particularly how contemporary fiction imagines using and living with media. His writing appears or is forthcoming in Critique, Novel, Sound Studies, and the collection The Crossroads of Music and Literature.
Contact Info
Please note the room has limited seating
This talk will not be recorded.