Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras

Faculty Member, Comparative Literature

Professor

Humanities

About

Ever since I can remember I had equal interests in math, science and literature.  Even though I wasn’t sure if I wanted to teach math, chemistry or literature, I knew that I wanted to belong to an academic community committed to society at large through the production of knowledge.  I soon discovered that I liked science for unusual reasons.  A footnote in our text that my classmates would skip to get right into the organic chemistry formula would catch my full attention:  “In a dream, Friedrich August Kekulé saw a snake coil up, and grab its own tail.  It struck him that benzene might be a ‘ring.’”  What a narration! The basic chemical structure in the field of organic chemistry was founded on a myth? But is it possible to think without images?  This simple footnote meant to me that although scientific knowledge is built on experimentation and research, its interpretation belongs to narration and the construction of images.  I thought that since some images are apprehended through sight, some through sound, and some through both, science was impossible without the production of images and narration. Literature itself could “coil up and grab its own tail,” but they are nevertheless connected to all other narratives and images around them, as complex organic connections.  An organic reader of literature, I see myself as a science student who would pay too much attention to the margin, and a literature professor who cannot see the field as an isolated atom.

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