‘Sing, My Child’: The Lullaby’s Dialogical Emotional Atmosphere in Magdalena Fleitas’s ‘Rayito de sol’

Abstract

Despite being presented and commonly perceived as a simple and straightforward genre, lullabies raise multiple issues and questions. When attempting to contribute to their study, fleshing out research from a segment of critical theory seldom applied to this sort of literary work can prove useful. Taking infant listeners as possible venture points to explore the genre might allow us to outline an adequate theoretical framework to analyse lullabies whose textual configuration highlights the infant's reception as an opening for epistemological construction. Such is the case, I argue, in Magdalena Fleitas's ‘Rayito de sol’, as the singer-songwriter imprints her song with openings for the child to engage in a dialogic dimension pulsing in the articulation practices and enactment contexts of every lullaby, and which further allows us to account for how corporeality and emotion interconnect in order to substantiate a field of shared emotions between adults and children.