When English professor Dr. Joshua Toth sat down with Kelsie Howlett and the Research Recast(ed) podcast to talk about his research, the conversation took several turns.

“My background has always been in postmodernism,” said Dr. Toth, the 2024-26 Board of Governors Research Chair recipient. His research has tended to focus on narrative works that frustrate the illusion of realism, or that outwardly mock or parody “works of literature or film that try to present themselves in a way that creates the illusion of authenticity, so that you get lost in them – like Harry Potter.” 

The English professor who looks at how literature, film and philosophy intersect – especially in the contemporary moment – explained that “You suspend your disbelief” to passively or unthinkingly enjoy a movie or book or show.

But he went on to comment that a bit of disbelief could serve us well in today’s very real – and very digital – world. He explained how, thanks to social media, stories can spread without us questioning whether they are true facts or just someone’s biased opinions. Opinions we can get lost in. 

“Less and less people really understand the way in which their world is being shaped for them,” he said. 

“You have these accounts that are claiming things with no justification, you have people saying, ‘sometimes the truth isn’t the truth,’ or you have politicians saying that there are alternative facts,” he says. “That all just sounds like postmodernism. But it’s really just politicians and talking heads exploiting the idea that we can only access the truth through narrative forms. But those forms are not all equal. Some are far less true than others.”

At the centre of Dr. Toth’s interest in postmodernism is a narrative form called metafiction. 

While older than Shakespeare, metafiction is any fiction or story that announces its constructed nature, that announces its own fictionality in the moment of the actual narrative, says Dr. Toth. 

Today, metafiction finds its way into stories and movies like Deadpool. Whenever Deadpool takes us out of the “story” by talking to or looking at the camera, we are suddenly hyper-aware that what we are watching is not real, and we aren’t lost in that world anymore. 

“These metafictional moments can teach us to read the narratives that determine our reality more critically, or with more skepticism,” he says. “But they can also be used to make us doubt the very possibility of truth.”

For the remainder of his research chair position, Dr. Toth will be co-editing The Routledge Companion to Metafiction and writing a few books – one of which is titled Screens of the Self; or, The Cinematic Fiction of Autobiography – and organizing conferences in Germany, Brazil and Spain as part of his role with the Association for Philosophy and Literature. 

To learn more about what he researches, watch the full podcast:

Watch the full podcast

You can also listen to a past podcast to learn more about Dr. Toth’s research into Francis Ford Coppola’s vampire movie, Twixt.