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Notes on the Death of Culture

By Mario Vargas Llosa & John King
Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa & John King digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

The Peruvian Nobel laureate presents a collection of essays on the decline of intellectual life in the age of media spectacle.

In the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. Notes on the Death of Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation—penned by Mario Vargas Llosa, who is not only one of our finest novelists but one of the keenest social critics.

Taking his cues from T.S. Eliot—whose essay “Notes Toward a Definition of Culture” is a touchstone precisely because the culture Eliot aimed to describe has since vanished—Vargas Llosa traces a decline whose ill effects have only just begun. He mourns, in particular, the figure of the intellectual: for most of the twentieth century, men and women of letters drove political, aesthetic, and moral conversations; today they have all but disappeared from public debate.

But Vargas Llosa stubbornly refuses to fade into the background. A necessary gadfly, the Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa, here vividly translated by John King, provides a tough but essential critique of our time and culture.

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About Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." He has also won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor. His many works include The Feast of the Goat, The Bad Girl, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

John King
is a professor of Latin American cultural history at the University of Warwick, England. He is the coeditor, with Efraín Kristal, of The Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa, and he has edited and translated several volumes of Vargas Llosa's essays, including Making Waves (FSG, 1996) and Touchstones (FSG, 2007).

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