Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society - Paperback

by Mario Vargas Llosa (Author), John King (Translator)

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

A provocative essay collection that finds the Nobel laureate taking on the decline of intellectual life

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 at work today.

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 to be felt. 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. A necessary gadfly, the Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa provides a tough but essential critique of our time and culture.

Author Biography

Mario Vargas Llosa is Peru's foremost author and the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1994 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and in 1995 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His many distinguished works include The Storyteller, The Feast of the Goat, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Death in the Andes, In Praise of the Stepmother, The Bad Girl, Conversation in the Cathedral, The Way to Paradise, and The War of the End of the World. He lives in London