FSEM 150   Literature and Exile

Faculty Profile for Professor Padilla Rios

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus states the following about his artistic mission, “I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.” Modernity can be characterized as a period of increased mobility, exile, migration, and movement all over the globe. How have writers and artists responded to this increased sense of homelessness? Students look at modern fiction through the lens of migration and exile and at modernist writers such as Jean Rhys, as well as more contemporary voices like Michael Ondaatje. Students who successfully complete this seminar will receive course credit for ENGL 207 and satisfy one half of the Human Thought and Expression area of inquiry requirement.

Javier Padilla is Assistant Professor of English at Colgate University. His current research project, The Poetics of the Instant, examines the work of several 20th century poets, philosophers, artists and thinkers around the discourse of immediacy and temporality—from Bergson and Heidegger's conceptualizations of time, Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of the instant; the post-romantic exploration of time in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the poetics of temporal subjectivity in Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop; and W.B. Yeats’s and Derek Walcott’s postcolonial explorations of modernity and coloniality: a concept elaborated by philosopher Aníbal Quijano as a critique of Anglo-European temporality and historicism.