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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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Finnish Outsiders. The Narration of Existential Feelings in Prose Fiction of the 1950s
This study explores the narration of existential feelings, or feelings of being in the world, in post-war Finnish prose fiction. The book presents five case studies which address modern individuals’ struggles in boundary situations of their lives. Rigorous readings of the works of Kerttu-Kaarina Suosalmi, Lassi Nummi, Marko Tapio, Tyyne Saastamoinen and Eeva-Liisa Manner all show the influence of French existentialism and its predecessors on post-war Finnish modernism for the first time in literary studies. The outsider figures and their experiences of the absurd, which have enticed the cultural imagination since ancient cults and the Book of Job, connect to the atmosphere of shared melancholy in post-war Finnish culture and society.
The study participates in the rich contemporary debates on the effects of literature by focusing on less-discussed aspects of bodily feeling, affect, emotion and mood in late Finnish modernism. The book’s methodological contribution to narrative theory is that it combines a phenomenological analysis of reading with a rhetorical theory of narrative and politically informed, multidisciplinary emotion studies. The five case studies show how modernist outsider prose fiction in Finland resorts to irony, metafiction, allegory and the imaginative to generate ethically challenging narrative tension and an ambivalence of negative and positive emotion in readers. The opposing impulses of the aesthetic response produce an openness of interpretation. This openness provides us with the possibility of a more complex cultural understanding of emotion and ethics in the lives of strangers within literature and outside it.
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Indomitable. Matti Kurikka's dreams and failures on three continents
Matti Kurikka (1863–1915) is a multi-dimensional and controversial character in Finnish history. He was a playwright, a journalist, a socialist, and a theosophist, as well as a speaker for sexual emancipation and women's rights. Kurikka was born in Ingria, and his activities spanned not only Finland, but also Australia and North America, in both of which he led utopian communities. This biographical study explores Kurikka as a literary and political figure and a builder of utopias, whose life opens fascinating views on the societal and cultural currents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book critically re-evaluates earlier research on Kurikka and highlights forgotten phases of his life by using new source materials found in three continents. The sources include digitized newspapers and periodicals, Kurikka's plays and non-fictional books, oral history, and political cartoons.
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Linguistic encounters in the history of Turku. Perspectives on multilingualism
The present volume is a multidisciplinary collection of research articles exploring language use, language contact and multilingualism in the history of Turku, the first town in Finland, founded around the turn of the fourteenth century. Consisting of an introduction by the editors and nine case studies in the fields of linguistics, history, archeology, and literary and cultural studies, the volume participates in a wider discussion on multilingual communities while offering a closer look into linguistic encounters in Turku and its immediate vicinity. The volume covers the period from the Middle Ages (c. 1100–1500) to the latter half of the twentieth century. The case studies illustrate the wide array of languages, linguistic varieties and registers that the inhabitants and travellers used in their daily lives, the specific contexts in which certain languages were used, and the effects of these linguistic encounters at personal, social or institutional levels.
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Language and interaction in human-animal communities
This collection of articles sheds light on the role of human language in interspecies interaction. The book shows that language is not necessarily what separates us from other creatures. It can also be seen as yet another dimension of human existence that is deeply rooted in our shared history and everyday life with other living beings. This volume contains six individual research articles, two short reviews, an opening introduction to the themes of the book, and an extensive, theoretical closing chapter. The studies draw on methodologies and theoretical approaches including conversation analysis and a cognitive, usage-based approach to grammatical constructions. The book further explores the interfaces of linguistics, biosemiotics, and posthumanism. The studies show how linguistic and interactional approaches can contribute to our understanding of how human and non-human animals communicate with each other during embodied activities, how human language users make sense of interspecies encounters in speaking to or about animals, and how human language is thereby impregnated by the presence of other species. The individual research articles study, e.g., interaction with co-present animals, dialectal cow calls, parliamentary speeches, narratives of nature observation, and historical laws.
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Narrative After Postmodernism takes a critical and practical look at the cultural theories of what comes after postmodernism or the postmodern. Alongside contemporary literary authors, the anthology studies diverse contemporary textual phenomena from TV shows to online fan theories and survivalist blogs. The essays compiled in this anthology tentatively apply the theories of the post-postmodern to contemporary texts to see how they might open up for analysis within their new theoretical frameworks or challenge them.
The introduction, co-written by all the authors of this volume, introduces the most influential theories of post-postmodernism and contextualizes them within broader intellectual trends of the early 21st Century. The three essays comprising the first part of the volume discuss some of the theories of the postmodern in relation to contemporary works that seem to challenge them. Yet they also strive to clarify and sharpen some of the ideas proposed in the theories of the post-postmodern.
The second part of the volume aims to show that it is not only the contemporary texts that move beyond the postmodern – the ways of reading literature and interpreting artworks in different media are also changing. The essays in the second part of the volume inquire about the effects of the contemporary literary culture on the methods of interpretation and ways of reading.
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Ingrians, Setos and Votes: historical culture, religious traditions and language
The book focuses on intangible and tangible heritage, language and vernacular religion of the Ingrians, Setos and Votes, three Finnic ethnic minorities sharing a long-standing identification with the Russian Orthodox faith. Written by 16 authors, the chapters are mainly based on nineteenth- and twentieth-century materials. The research history and collecting of folklore are also discussed.
The historical area of the Ingrians and Votes is located in Ingria, adjacent to St. Petersburg, while the Setos have inhabited both sides of the border of southern Estonia and Russia. All three groups live on the borderline of the Eastern and Western Churches and cultural realms.
Currently, the Ingrian and Votic languages are extremely endangered, while the Seto language has approximately 12,000 speakers. There is a high local interest in the maintenance and revitalisation of all three languages and cultural traditions.
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The topic of the book is the incremental growth of linguistic knowledge from lexical to structural-cum-textual during the so-called later language development. Language mastery does not presuppose any acquaintance with prescriptive grammar but, instead, concerns the core of language which the so-called consensus principle applies to: the most frequent words and structures are mastered with certainty by everybody, but uncertainty increases as less frequent and more variable phenomena are taken into consideration. It is the goal of the study to make explicit the knowledge that is common to school children of different age groups, and to show how it develops both in its core and in its fringe areas. The mastery of less common aspects exhibits considerable statistical variation. The research embodies methodological pluralism insofar as it has been carried out by means both of the corpus method and the experimental method. Here experimental subsumes writing tasks, paper-and-pencil tests, and behavior under experimental conditions. The amount of participants native in Finnish varies from 300–2000. The book has a bipartite structure: mastery of meanings (Part I), and mastery of forms (Part II).
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