Introduction -- 1 Opening -- 2 Arguedas and Vargas Llosa, or the Dilemmas of the Model Intellectual -- 3 Archaism as Floating Signifier -- 4 Language as a Battlefield (I): The Dilemma of the Sign -- 5 Language as a Battlefield (II): The Narcissism of the Voice -- 6 Toward a Poetics of Social Change: Truth, Modernity, and the National Subject in Jose Maria Arguedas -- 7 Which Truth?: Otherness and Melodrama in Vargas Llosa -- 8 Endpoint?: Death/The Nobel Prize
This book provides a groundbreaking analysis of the most prominent writers of contemporary Peru, in which literary works and cultural performances are illuminated through the categories and propositions of postcolonial theory. The study entails a discussion of thematic choices, representational strategies and political contexts, as well as a daring analysis of Vargas Llosa's Nobel Prize and Arguedas' suicide as paradigmatic instances in these authors' cultural and ideological development. Topics such as indigenismo, archaism, modernity, otherness, popular culture, and cultural diversity traverse through this book, which constitutes, more than a traditional academic exercise, a critical intervention in the field of Latin American studies
