Fairy tales in faraway places

In 1873 Arthur Rimbaud wrote and published an extended poem in prose called A Season in Hell . He finished writing it after having spent time living in London, where he had a complicated homosexual love affair with fellow French poet Paul Verlaine. His time living in London was influential in his work because he was able to observe himself through the eyes of Verlaine, leading to a process of self-analysis rather than simply adopting an autobiographical style. In the 1870’s certain areas of London became synonymous with debauchery and poverty which was exposed in Rimbaud’s writing style. It is here that he first encountered heavy alcoholism through gin and beer as well as drugs such as opium. This had an effect on his poetry in both the tone and the narrative comprehensibility. It was often difficult to understand what he was writing, even when one is sober. Rimbaud spoke of the derangement of the senses in order to truly find oneself and London was a place that easily facilitated...

According to Assmann, cultural memory belongs to a group of people who share the same space or time and is rooted in a mythical or historical narrative. [1] It can be contained in objects such as photographs known as “figures of memory” [2] which represent fixed moments in time that resituate past events in the present when circulated. The value of these memory objects and iconic images themselves thus rests in their symbolic function within cultural memory. [3] This essay will focus on two specific case studies that have often been described as the icons of war photography and are examples of photojournalism: The Falling Solider (full and original title: Death of a Loyalist Militiaman, Cordoba front, September 1936) [4] by Robert Capa and The Napalm Girl (also known as Accidental Napalm Attack ) [5] taken in 1972 by Nick Ut.   The first photograph depicts the moment in which a Republican soldier was killed by being shot in the head during the Spanish Civil War. He is fal...

Valenzuela’s writing carries a great preoccupation with the use of power and the structures of domination as reflected by the focus on the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor, those who govern and those who are governed and the male and the female. Cambio de Armas is a collection of short stories from which the essay will focus on two: ‘De noche soy tu Caballo’ and ‘Cambio de Armas’ respectively. In each short story the female protagonists experience is of central importance and it is always shaped and determined by either one man or a group of men who represent the applied power of the established system. The politics in the personal sphere thereby becomes allegorical for that in the public spheres. Within the context of the short stories and the politically oppressive regime of the Argentine military dictatorship in the 80’s and 70’s, men and women are binary opposites on an unbalanced scale. Women are initially presented as subservient to their male counterpart ...