Speaker(s): Tamara L. Mitchell (University of British Columbia, Vancouver)
We are thrilled to announce our Spring session of ILAC Speaker Series: In the Key of Crisis. This grad-student curated series hosts emerging scholars who present on their work and discuss professional development in today's academia. Participants are kick-starting their careers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Latin America. Previously, we have hosted Delfina Cabrera (ICI Berlin), Gabriel Rudas (Universidad Javeriana), and Esther Gimeno Ugalde (Universität Wien).
This event will feature a presentation by Tamara L. Mitchell (University of British Columbia, Vancouver).
In the Key of Crisis: Intermediality, Temporality, and Labor in Laury Leite’s En la soledad de un cielo muerto
. *This talk will be in English. Questions may be asked in Spanish or English. Lunch boxes will be provided.
Abstract:
The present study attends to the imbrication of temporality, affect, labor, and sound in Mexican-Canadian novelist Laury Leite’s En la soledad de un cielo muerto (2017). Set in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis, En la soledad tells the story of André Urrutia, a thirty-something failed business owner who must return to his childhood home in Mexico City to live with his mother after the shuttering of his clock shop in Madrid. The novel shifts between the narrative perspective of André and that of his mother, which differ significantly in terms of form, tone, and literary devices. My analysis focuses on the presence, absence, and function of musicality in each of these narrative perspectives, paying particular attention to the novel’s intermedial relationship with classical music of the Romantic period. Throughout, I reflect on the role of formal and thematic motifs, particularly in relation to the cyclical presence of crisis in the narrative. Ultimately, I argue that the novel indexes and responds to two related tendencies provoked by finance capitalism: the expansion of the Fordist workday to fill all moments and activities and the increasing precarization and informality of labor, both of which are accompanied by a corresponding shrinking of the middle class.