page_title: Mario Vargas Llosa
section_title: Modernism and postmodernism
hierarchical_section_title: Mario Vargas Llosa / Style of writing / Modernism and postmodernism
caption_attribution_description: Español: Mario Vargas Llosa y Aitana Sánchez-Gijón interpretando "Los cuentos de la peste" en el Teatro Español de Madrid, 6 de febrero de 2015English: Mario Vargas Llosa and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón playing "Los cuentos de la peste" in Teatro Español, Madrid. 6th February 2015
context_page_description: Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa, more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, essayist and college professor. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat."
  Vargas Llosa rose to international fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero, The Green House, and the monumental Conversation in the Cathedral. He writes prolifically across an array of literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism. His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers. Several, such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, have been adapted as feature films.
context_section_description: The works of Mario Vargas Llosa are viewed as both modernist and postmodernist novels. Though there is still much debate over the differences between modernist and postmodernist literature, literary scholar M. Keith Booker claims that the difficulty and technical complexity of Vargas Llosa's early works, such as The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral, are clearly elements of the modern novel. Furthermore, these earlier novels all carry a certain seriousness of attitude—another important defining aspect of modernist art. By contrast, his later novels such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, and The Storyteller (El hablador) appear to follow a postmodernist mode of writing. These novels have a much lighter, farcical, and comic tone, characteristics of postmodernism. Comparing two of Vargas Llosa's novels, The Green House and Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, Booker discusses the contrast between modernism and postmodernism found in the writer's works: while both novels explore the theme of prostitution as well as the workings of the Peruvian military, Booker points out that the former is gravely serious whereas the latter is ridiculously comic.
caption: Mario Vargas Llosa, actor in his play "Los cuentos de la peste", with Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Teatro Español, Madrid (2015).
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