Victoria Zurita is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Stanford University. She received a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a Master’s degree in French and comparative literature from Paris 7 Denis Diderot. She specializes in nineteenth-century French and Spanish American literatures and conducts research on the history of subjectivity, literary modernisms, and value theory.
SHC Project
The Paradoxes of Aesthetic Individualism: Fashioning Selves and Communities in Fin-de-siècle France and Spanish America
Zurita’s dissertation studies a constellation of ethical and aesthetic ideals common to three intersecting literary movements which flourished during the last three decades of the French and Spanish American nineteenth century: Symbolism, Decadence, and Modernismo. She has termed this constellation “aesthetic individualism”—the valorization of an individual’s uniqueness, self-determination, and integrity, and the cultivation of these qualities through art. Her dissertation argues that positive and ambivalent representations of highly aestheticized individuals allowed prominent writers to problematize an array of social, political, and geopolitical issues, and to express their desire and anxieties about communal identities at multiple scales.