The Elementary Structure of Kinship

Abstract La Tia Ulia Y El Escribidor is widely regarded to be representative of a significant transformation that occurred in Vargas Llosa’s literary production-a shift that purportedly had begun with the author’s previous novel, Pantaleon y las visitadoras, published in 1973.1 This “new” phase of Vargas Llosa’s novelistic production is considered as having marked the inflection in his works of some of the qualities and concerns that are understood to be characteristic of literary postmodernism: humor, the literary exploration and exploitation of low cultural discourses, the undermining of the novelistic subject as an organizing principle, the radical questioning of ideological commitment, and so on.