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The Writer’s Poetics. Poetics as an Approach to an Author’s Body of Work is an introduction to the writer’s poetics as a distinctive research orientation, as well as a collection of case studies focusing on authors working in different eras and languages. While the 20th Century traditions of poetics have produced studies on the textual styles and techniques that characterize the writing of particular authors, the research orientation has not been explicitly defined and sufficiently theorized. The Writer’s Poetics frames the research orientation theoretically, and the 14 case studies making up the chapters demonstrate the diversity of viewpoints available within it. The contributors study authors ranging from 19th Century Finnish-Swedish female writers to 20th Century African-American novelists to postmodernist and contemporary authors of prose and lyric – and to the most successful Finnish rap artists of the 2010’s.
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Finnish-Russian Literary Relations 1800-1930
Current volume examines Finnish-Russian literary contacts that have not been thoroughly studied previously – the translation and reception history of Russian literature in Finland, and Finnish literature in Russia from 1800 until 1930. Personal contacts have influenced the decisions of what to translate and by whom more than the evident European context of Russian literature. In Finland, the relationship with Russia and attitudes to its literature have always been a political issue. Hostile relations have meant a remarkable decrease in translations, but maintained active discussion of Russian culture. During more friendly times, the inquisitive interest has increased and led to more intensive translation activities. However, since the early days of Finnish literature, only few intellectuals have known Russian well enough to translate literature into Swedish or Finnish. Consequently, translating has been highly dependent on individual mediators, often with a transnational identity.
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Superdiversity. Perspectives on the multiplicity of migration
This book is the first Finnish-language collection of research on superdiversity. At the core of the book is the growing migration to Finland since the turn of the 1990s and its numerous effects on Finnish society. The interdisciplinary examination of superdiversity is important at the current moment: Finland as a society has reached the point where certain social categories, such as ethnic background, country of birth, mother tongue or gender, are not necessarily sufficient to understand the increased diversity and its consequences.
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Interpreting brothers-in-war. Multilingual day-to-day life during the Continuation War in Finland
This volume looks at the Finnish-German military alliance (1941–1944) as a translation zone – a multilingual network of military, administrative and civilian encounters that was held together by linguistically versed soldiers and civilians acting as interpreters and translators. It focuses on interpreters and liaison officers of the Finnish Liaison Staff in Rovaniemi, who were assigned to the staffs of the German army units with the task of maintaining communication between the two armies and assisting German troops in their daily matters. Furthermore, attention is paid to Finnish civilians, especially women whose language skills made them candidates for a range of mediation tasks in the German units. The reconstruction of military interpreters’ and liaison officers’ tasks and mediation agency between the two military cultures is based on their war-time weekly reports, whereas the civilian interpreters’ experiences are drawn from a variety of autobiographical accounts, including interviews.
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The Nature of Words. Writings on the Poetics and Environments of Vernacular Expression
In recent decades, the focus of Folklore Studies has shifted from analysing the products of oral traditions as texts to examining the ways in which people use and produce these items, and the areas of study have broadened to include vernacular cultures and genres in diverse verbal and material forms. As evident from the introduction and twelve chapters of this collection, these interests are today shared by several disciplines that cooperate in the area of cultural studies. This book provides insights into current questions about the “nature” of words: it discusses both the inherent essence of vernacular expression and how that essence is tied to various genre-ecological, performative, and material environments. The chapters include studies on the poetics, form, function, performance, and composition of traditional and new vernacular forms, including explorations of hybridity, materiality, and change, as well as critical examinations of archival practices and publication processes.
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Traumatic Memory in Contemporary Prose Fiction
This is the first study to examine Finnish trauma fiction in detail. The book discusses the novels of Katja Kettu, Sofi Oksanen, Elina Hirvonen and Emmi Itäranta, where historical and collective traumas meet stories of personal vulnerability. Traumatic Memory in Contemporary Prose Fiction addresses war traumas and marks left by terrorism, colonialism, domestic violence and sexual violence, and analyses the aspects of ecological trauma and future threats.
The study combines the latest discussions on cultural memory studies and trauma theory with critical perspectives offered by feminist criticism and research in transnationalism. It illustrates how cultural narratives, literary conventions and aesthetic strategies regulate and produce traumatic experiences. Traumatic memory is not only a phenomenon dealing with the past, but it involves a wide range of individual, cultural, ecological, political and economic dimensions.
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Experiences of Mental Hospitals. Spaces Engraved in Memories
Finnish psychiatric practice has been heavily based on institutionalization, and mental hospitals have played important cultural and historical roles in Finland. Our multidisciplinary research focuses on the bodily, spatial, affective, and multisensory aspects of the memories of patients, relatives, staff, and their children. The memories were collected and archived in the Finnish Literature Society in 2014–2015. These 92 written pieces cover the period from the 1930s to the 2010s. They reflect significant changes in Finnish psychiatry and provide crucial insights into the various meanings of mental hospitals in people’s lives, and the social and cultural forces that shape attitudes to and ideas about mental health problems, psychiatric care, and service users today.
Drawing on our backgrounds in history, artistic research, and visual, cultural and literary studies, we provide new ways of reading and interpreting the memories and experiences in psychiatry. The study discusses memory, mental hospitals as lived spaces, the history of Finnish psychiatry and the relation between the memories of the different groups of writers. The chapters approach memories from the perspectives of affects and atmospheres, violence and abuse, everyday life at the hospital in the 1930s, feelings of fear and safety in the memories of the children of the staff, and the historically and culturally contingent tensions between hospitals and homes.
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The Place of Research on Memory-Based Knowledge. Theories, Practices and Change
The volume is a comprehensive handbook of oral history and memory studies in Finland. The Finnish research field has originally emerged at the collaborative intersection of history, folklore studies, and ethnology. Since then, this field has developed into vibrant multi- and cross-disciplinary arena characterized by a strong focus on methodological issues related to memory in culture and theoretical engagement with studies on narration and processes of remembering. The chapters of the book explore the perspectives on the production of memory-based knowledge in oral history interviews and collection campaigns of written reminiscences. Moreover, the book introduces versatile methodological approaches to the study of memory and memories, ranging from narrative to corpus analysis, and investigates the multiple media of remembrance from documentary film to museum exhibition. The chapters of the book also engage the field’s disciplinary position and interrogate the potentials and challenges related to the application of the methods of oral history research and the use of memory-based knowledge beyond academia in political, societal, and community-based projects.
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The Art of Sofi Oksanen’s Novels. Narrative, Ethics, Rhetoric
Sofi Oksanen is the most visible and widely discussed Finnish author of the 21st century, yet her novels have gained less attention than her public performances. This study shifts the focus from the author’s persona to her literary art, proposing to read Oksanen’s fiction from the methodological viewpoint of the rhetorical theory of narrative. Accordingly, Oksanen’s six novels published to date – Stalinin lehmät, Baby Jane, Puhdistus, Kun kyyhkyset katosivat, Norma, and Koirapuisto – are considered as examples of authorial rhetoric and ethics, as narrative and textual constructions, and as affective readerly experiences. Instead of only following the rhetorical theory’s emphasis on character, plot, and progression, however, the study develops a new kind of narrative rhetoric, which also pays attention to language and politics. In the study, Sofi Oksanen emerges as a feminist narrative artist, who employs fiction as a serious rhetorical resource in order to say something worthwhile about the past history as well as the contemporary world.
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Remembered and Imagined Soviet Union
The volume Remembered and Imagined Soviet Union addresses memories, conceptions, and images relating to the Soviet past from the perspective of cultural memory. The book explores how the Soviet Union has been recalled and how it has been depicted in cultural products like literature, museum exhibitions, art and the media. Instead of trying to say what the Soviet Union was, the book analyses the ways in which Finns, Russians and Estonians have viewed the Soviet past at different times. The book answers the following questions: What is remembered about the Soviet past? How has the country been represented in various cultural texts? What is forgotten or not talked about?
The book consists of chapters by scholars of history, literature and art studies. They look at key themes of the Soviet past in the framework of cultural memory, with topics including space conquest, the superiority of the hockey team, known as the "Red machine", political propaganda, and persecution of minorities.
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