The Working Group on Novel: Victoria Zurita
Speaker(s): Victoria Zurita (PhD candidate, Dept. of Comparative Literature, èצӰ)
Victoria Zurita, PhD candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, Dissertation Chapter:“Tú lo que quieres es gozar:” collecting, self-fashioning, and the historical consciousness of franco-colombian decadence.”
Respondent: Lisa Surwillo, Professor and Chair of ILAC, èצӰ
Dissertation Chapter: “Tú lo que quieres es gozar:” collecting, self-fashioning, and the historical consciousness of franco-colombian decadence.”
In this chapter, Victoria Zurita studies two major decadent novels: José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa [After-dinner Conversation] and Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A rebours [Against Nature]. Therein, she seeks to describe how these two novels’ meticulous representations of art collections, aesthetic judgements, and aesthetic experiences give rise to desirable projections of a national past (Huysmans) and a regional future (Silva). She also shows that the appeal of these projections depends on the kind of individuality that the practice of collecting artworks and luxury objects is meant to produce. In A rebours, singularity and autonomy are the goal of Des Esseintes’ self-regulated aesthetic experiences. In De sobremesa, José Fernández seeks integrity—the unification of his divided self—through his artistic, commercial, and amorous pursuits. In neither case, however, is the singular, autonomous, and integrated individual valued for its own sake. Rather, these achievements of self-fashioning draw their normative force from medical discourses on national decline and regional backwardness. Thus, De sobremesa and A rebours represent different dimensions of artistic activity as a means to imagining alternative historical narratives for France and Latin America.
Please email Cynthia Giancotti-Vialle (cinziag [at] stanford.edu (cinziag[at]stanford[dot]edu)) for a copy of the paper.
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