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<p>My dissertation, “Fictional Timing: Neoliberalism and Time in the Contemporary
Latin American Novel”, studies recent developments in the Latin American novel to
better understand the relation between economics and time in contemporary Latin America.
I analyze Alberto Fuguet’s Las películas de mi vida (2002) Jorge Volpi’s No sera la
Tierra (2006), Pedro Mairal’s El año del desierto (2005), Diamela Eltit’s Los trabajadores
de la muerte (1998) and Mano de obra (2002), as well as Barataria (volume 1 published
in 2012, volume 2 published in 2013) by Juan López Bauzá, to argue that at the heart
of the Latin American novel’s examination of the shifting signifier that is “neoliberalism”
(Brown 20), we find a return to matters of time and temporality. Since the early 1970s,
Latin America has provided a site for political experiments in reshaping the dynamics
between the social and economic spheres, thus between citizens and the market. The
region became the third great stage for the neoliberal model, as well as the first
systematic experiment of neoliberal reforms during Pinochet’s dictatorship (Valencia
478). It has become all but commonplace to credit changes in technology, debt reforms,
privatization, austerity, and global markets for a distinctively contemporary experience
of time as the acceleration and compression of lived experience that ensures a predictable
future (Harvey 1989; Lazzarato 2012). While taking this now commonplace view into
account, I conclude that contemporary Latin American novels insist on the heterogeneity
of temporal experiences. Each chapter explores these diverse times at work within
neoliberal rationality, discourses, practices, and subjectivities.</p>
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