Presented by the STELA Salon Series and the ECL Critical Speaker Series, "Practicing Literary Criticism in an Age of Speed” with Professor Jonathan Sachs brings readings of Wordsworth to bear on broader issues facing literary scholars today: it’s what it means to change one’s mind as a critic; what it means to write in a mode that requires patience (criticism) in a context where speed is a premium (Wordsworth’s print culture, our digital culture); it bears on our reading debates and especially on what it means to "close read" and what it might mean to think of close reading as historicist method (the idea of immanence in a literary work and how to read history without reading event/context). 

About the Speaker: Jonathan Sachs is Professor of English at Concordia University. His research explores the role of literature in constructing historical and temporal experience, including the uses of antiquity, the anticipation of the future, and practices of reading. Currently at work on a monograph titled Slow Time: A Literary Experiment, Sachs is the author of two earlier monographs and the co-author of Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in an Era of Print Saturation. Sachs has served as the Principal Investigator of the Interacting with Print Research Group (2014-2020), as the Romanticism Section editor of Blackwell’s Literature Compass (2015-2020) and as a member of the MLA’s Executive Committee for Later Eighteenth-Century Literature (2015-2020). He has held a range of international fellowships, including Visiting Fellowships at Clare Hall, Cambridge and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. More recent research has been supported by multiple awards from the SSHRC and by residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center (US) and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.