Cosmic Clowns : Convention, Invention, and Inversion in the Yaqui Easter Ritual

Cosmic Clowns: Convention, Invention, and Inversion in the Yaqui Easter Ritual is an ethnographic study of masked clown figures called Chapayekas. They represent Judas and the Roman soldiers in the Passion play that forms the narrative core of the Easter ritual of the Yaquis, an indigenous group in Sonora, Mexico. The study looks at how the Chapayeka is created as a ritual figure, how their performance is constructed, and what the part of the clown is in the dynamics of the ritual. The material was gathered over three periods of anthropological fieldwork in Cócorit, Sonora during Easter in 2004, 2006 and 2007. The Chapayeka masks portray foreigners, animals, mythological figures, and even figures from television and movies. They combine two kinds of performance: they perform set, conventional actions, and improvise and invent new ones. This creates dialectics of invention and convention that allow the figure to mediate between the ritual and its context and different kinds of beings within the Yaqui cosmology. The conventional side of their performance is a cycle of death and rebirth that is an inversion of the cycle of Jesus. Through invention, they separate themselves from the other performers and make themselves powerful. Alternation between the two modes enhances that power and brings it into the conventions of the ritual; ultimately the Chapayekas revitalize the entire ritual. The study finds that the clowns are extremely important to the continuity of both ritual and culture, as the combination of continuity and change, convention and invention, is what makes it possible to recreate the conventions of Yaqui culture as powerful and compelling in various contexts. Another factor is the prevalence of dialectical mediation, which relates concepts by defining them against each other as opposites, and makes it possible to cross a boundary while keeping it intact. Clowns embody and create dialectics to mediate boundaries while guarding against relativization, the disappearance of distinctions. The Chapayekas create and constitute boundaries between the self and other, microcosm and macrocosm, sacred and profane. The study argues that all clown and trickster figures are characterized by constantly alternating between invention and convention; this is what connects them to the collective and moral aspect of culture and, at the same time, makes them unpredictable and powerful. It is possible to do justice to the opposed aspects of these ambiguous and paradoxical figures by taking into account the different foundations and contextual effects of the different modes of symbolization.

Counter-figures : An Essay on Antimetaphoric Resistance: Paul Celan's Poetry and Poetics at the Limits of Figurality

Titled "An Essay on Antimetaphoric Resistance", the dissertation investigates what is here being called "Counter-figures": a term which has in this context a certain variety of applications. Any other-than-image or other-than-figure, anything that cannot be exhausted by figuration (and that is, more or less, anything at all, except perhaps the reproducible images and figures themselves) can be considered "counter-figurative" with regard to the formation of images and figures, ideas and schemas, "any graven image, or any likeness of any thing". Singularity and radical alterity, as well as temporality and its peculiar mode of uniqueness are key issues here, and an ethical dimension is implied by, or intertwined with, the aesthetic. In terms borrowed from Paul Celan's "Meridian" speech, poetry may "allow the most idiosyncratic quality of the Other, its time, to participate in the dialogue". This connection between singularity, alterity and temporality is one of the reasons why Celan so strongly objects to the application of the traditional concept of metaphor to poetry. As Celan says, "carrying over [übertragen]" by metaphor may imply an unwillingness to "bear with [mittragen]" and to "endure [ertragen]" the poem. The thesis is divided into two main parts. The first consists of five distinct prolegomena which all address the mentioned variety of applications of the term "counter-figures", and especially the rejection or critique of either metaphor (by Aristotle, for instance) or the concept of metaphor (defined by Aristotle, and sometimes deemed "anti-poetic" by both theorists and poets). Even if we restrict ourselves to the traditional rhetorico-poetical terms, we may see how, for instance, metonymy can be a counter-figure for metaphor, allegory for symbol, and irony for any single trope or for any piece of discourse at all. The limits of figurality may indeed be located at these points of intersection between different types of tropes or figures, and even between figures or tropes and the "non-figurative trope" or "pseudo-figure" called catachresis. The second part, following on from the open-ended prolegomena, concentrates on Paul Celan's poetry and poetics. According to Celan, true poetry is "essentially anti-metaphoric". I argue that inasmuch as we are willing to pay attention to the "will" of the poetic images themselves (the tropes and metaphors in a poem) to be "carried ad absurdum", as Celan invites us to do, we may find alternative ways of reading poetry and approaching its "secret of the encounter", precisely when the traditional rhetorical instruments, and especially the notion of metaphor, become inapplicable or suspicious — and even where they still seem to impose themselves.

Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia: Joseph Brodsky and Travel Writing

Joseph Brodsky, one of the most influential Russian intellectuals of the late Soviet period, was born in Leningrad in 1940, emigrated to the United States in 1972, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, and died in New York City in 1996. Brodsky was one of the leading public figures of Soviet emigration in the Cold War period, and his role as a model for the constructing of Russian cultural identities in the last years of the Soviet Union was, and still is, extremely important. One of Joseph Brodsky’s great contributions to Russian culture of the latter half of the twentieth century is the wide geographical scope of his poetic and prose works. Brodsky was not a travel writer, but he was a traveling writer who wrote a considerable number of poems and essays which relate to his trips and travels in the Soviet empire and outside it. Travel writing offered for Brodsky a discursive space for negotiating his own transculturation, while it also offered him a discursive space for making powerful statements about displacement, culture, history and geography, time and space—all major themes of his poetry. In this study of Joseph Brodsky’s travel writing I focus on his travel texts in poetry and prose, which relate to his post-1972 trips to Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, and Venice. Questions of empire, tourism, and nostalgia are foregrounded in one way or another in Brodsky’s travel writing performed in emigration. I explore these concepts through the study of tropes, strategies of identity construction, and the politics of representation. The theoretical premises of my work draw on the literary and cultural criticism which has evolved around the study of travel and travel writing in recent years. These approaches have gained much from the scholarly experience provided by postcolonial critique. Shifting the focus away from the concept of exile, the traditional framework for scholarly discussions of Brodsky’s works, I propose to review Brodsky’s travel poetry and prose as a response not only to his exilic condition but to the postmodern and postcolonial landscape, which initially shaped the writing of these texts. Discussing Brodsky’s travel writing in this context offers previously unexplored perspectives for analyzing the geopolitical, philosophical, and linguistic premises of his poetic imagination. By situating Brodsky’s travel writing in the geopolitical landscape of postcolonial postmodernity, I attempt to show how Brodsky’s engagement with his contemporary cultural practices in the West was incorporated into his Russian-language travel poetry and prose and how this engagement thus contributed to these texts’ status as exceptional and unique literary events within late Soviet Russian cultural practices.

Andegraund : Istorija i mify leningradskoj neoficial'noj literatury

The history of the Leningrad underground is one of the key themes of late socialism. Samizdat, "black humour", religious syncretism, dissidence, apolitical bohemianism, the pathos of freedom of individuality and the mechanics of literature are closely interlinked with the cultural mythology of this passed epoch. Describing conceptions that, when taken together, form the contemporary understanding of unofficial culture, the author creates a historical portrait of this environment. Amongst the central figures here, there are well-known writers (Bitov, Brodsky, Dovlatov, Khvostenko, Krivulin) and literary activists who still await recognition. The analysis of works, many of which were only distributed in typewritten publications in the 1960s-1980s, gives a preliminary definition of the key factors that united the authors of the unofficial community. The book begins with a critique of the identification of the Soviet underground with political dissidence or with a society living in autonomous independence with regard to the state. Describing the historical development of the various names for this environment (the underground, samizdat, unofficial culture, podpolie and others), the author follows the genesis of the community from its appearance, in the years of "the Thaw", through to perestroika, when it dissolved. Taking the history of the publication of Bitov's "The Pushkin House" as an example, the concept of the unofficial is interpreted as a risky interaction with the authorities. Unofficial culture is then viewed as a late Soviet reflection of the Western underground in the 1950s-1960s. Unlike the radical-utopian-anarchistic source, it proclaimed a liberalist and democratic ideology in the context of the destruction of the socialist utopia. The historical portrait of the community is built up from the perceptions of its members regarding literature practice and rhetorical approaches, with the aid of which these perceptions are expressed. Taking typewritten publications as source material, four main representations are given: privacy, deviancy, criticism and irrationality. An understanding of literature as a private affair, neo-avant-garde deviancy in social and literary behaviour and the pathos of the critical relationship with officialdom and irrational message of literary work, comprise the basis for the worldview of unofficial authors, as well as the poetic system, genre preferences and dictums. An analysis of irrationality, based on the texts of Khvostenko and Bogdanov, leads to a review of the cultural mythologies that were crucial to the unofficial conception of the absurd. Absurd is an homonym. It contains ideas that are important for the worldview of unofficial authors and the poetics of their works. The irrationality of the Soviet order is reflected in the documentary nature of the satirical prose of Dovlatov. The existential absurd of Camus is perceived here as the pointlessness of social realities and the ontological alienation of man, while existentialist practices for consciousness in the "atmosphere of absurd" remain bracketed off. The third homonym of absurd - the conception of reality as an illusion - is a clear demonstration of religious syncretism, where neo-Christian ideas are interweaved with a modernized version of Hinduism, as taken from Rolland s books on Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. The unofficial community was influenced by the ideology of westernization. Even "the East" arrived here via French retellings and accounts. As a whole, unofficial Leningrad culture can be understood as a neo-modernist phenomenon which, unlike the western neo-modernism of the 1940s and 1950s, arose in the years of the Thaw and ended its existence in the mid-1980s.

Rhetoric and Representation : Exploring the Cultural Meaning of the Natural Sciences in Contemporary Popular Science Writing and Literature

Kirjallisuuden- ja kulttuurintutkimus on viimeisten kolmen vuosikymmenen aikana tullut yhä enenevässä määrin tietoiseksi tieteen ja taiteen suhteen monimutkaisesta luonteesta. Nykyään näiden kahden kulttuurin tutkimus muodostaa oman kenttänsä, jolla niiden suhdetta tarkastellaan ennen kaikkea dynaamisena vuorovaikutuksena, joka heijastaa kulttuurimme kieltä, arvoja ja ideologisia sisältöjä. Toisin kuin aiemmat näkemykset, jotka pitävät tiedettä ja taidetta toisilleen enemmän tai vähemmän vastakkaisina pyrkimyksinä, nykytutkimus lähtee oletuksesta, jonka mukaan ne ovat kulttuurillisesti rakentuneita diskursseja, jotka kohtaavat usein samankaltaisia todellisuuden mallintamiseen liittyviä ongelmia, vaikka niiden käyttämät metodit eroavatkin toisistaan. Väitöskirjani keskittyy yllä mainitun suhteen osa-alueista popularisoidun tietokirjallisuuden (muun muassa Paul Davies, James Gleick ja Richard Dawkins) käyttämän kielen ja luonnontieteistä ideoita ammentavan kaunokirjallisuuden (muun muassa Jeanette Winterson, Tom Stoppard ja Richard Powers) hyödyntämien keinojen tarkasteluun nojautuen yli 30 teoksen kattavaa aineistoa koskevaan tyylin ja teemojen tekstianalyysiin. Populaarin tietokirjallisuuden osalta tarkoituksenani on osoittaa, että sen käyttämä kieli rakentuu huomattavassa määrin sellaisille rakenteille, jotka tarjoavat mahdollisuuden esittää todellisuutta koskevia argumentteja mahdollisimman vakuuttavalla tavalla. Tässä tehtävässä monilla klassisen retoriikan määrittelemillä kuvioilla on tärkeä rooli, koska ne auttavat liittämään sanotun sisällön ja muodon tiukasti toisiinsa: retoristen kuvioiden käyttö ei näin ollen edusta pelkkää tyylikeinoa, vaan se myös usein kiteyttää argumenttien taustalla olevat tieteenfilosofiset olettamukset ja auttaa vakiinnuttamaan argumentoinnin logiikan. Koska monet aikaisemmin ilmestyneistä tutkimuksista ovat keskittyneet pelkästään metaforan rooliin tieteellisissä argumenteissa, tämä väitöskirja pyrkii laajentamaan tutkimuskenttää analysoimalla myös toisenlaisten kuvioiden käyttöä. Osoitan myös, että retoristen kuvioiden käyttö muodostaa yhtymäkohdan tieteellisiä ideoita hyödyntävään kaunokirjallisuuteen. Siinä missä popularisoitu tiede käyttää retoriikkaa vahvistaakseen sekä argumentatiivisia että kaunokirjallisia ominaisuuksiaan, kuvaa tällainen sanataide tiedettä tavoilla, jotka usein heijastelevat tietokirjallisuuden kielellisiä rakenteita. Toisaalta on myös mahdollista nähdä, miten kaunokirjallisuuden keinot heijastuvat popularisoidun tieteen kerrontatapoihin ja kieleen todistaen kahden kulttuurin dynaamisesta vuorovaikutuksesta. Nykyaikaisen populaaritieteen retoristen elementtien ja kaunokirjallisuuden keinojen vertailu näyttää lisäksi, kuinka tiede ja taide osallistuvat keskusteluun kulttuurimme tiettyjen peruskäsitteiden kuten identiteetin, tiedon ja ajan merkityksestä. Tällä tavoin on mahdollista nähdä, että molemmat ovat perustavanlaatuisia osia merkityksenantoprosessissa, jonka kautta niin tieteelliset ideat kuin ihmiselämän suuret kysymyksetkin saavat kulttuurillisesti rakentuneen merkityksensä.

La contextualisation du discours radiophonique par des moyens prosodiques. L’exemple de cinq grands philosophes français du XXe siècle

"Radiodiskurssin kontekstualisointi prosodisin keinoin. Esimerkkinä viisi suurta ranskalaista 1900-luvun filosofia" Väitöskirja käsittelee puheen kontekstualisointia prosodisin keinoin. Toisin sanottuna työssä käsitellään sitä, miten puheen prosodiset piirteet (kuten sävelkulku, intensiteetti, tauot, kesto ja rytmi) ohjaavat puheen tulkintaa vanhastaan enemmän tutkittujen sana- ja lausemerkitysten ohella. Työssä keskitytään seitsemään prosodisesti merkittyyn kuvioon, jotka koostuvat yhden tai usean parametrin silmiinpistävistä muutoksista. Ilmiöitä käsitellään sekä niiden akustisten muotojen että tyypillisten esiintymisyhteyksien ja diskursiivisten tehtävien näkökulmasta. Aineisto koostuu radio-ohjelmista, joissa puhuu viisi suurta ranskalaista 1900-luvun filosofia: Gaston Bachelard, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty ja Jean-Paul Sartre. Ohjelmat on lähetetty eri radiokanavilla Ranskassa vuosina 1948–1973. Väitöskirjan tulokset osoittavat, että prosodisesti merkityt kuviot ovat moniulotteisia puheen ilmiöitä, joilla on keskeinen rooli sanotun kontekstualisoinnissa: ne voivat esimerkiksi nostaa tai laskea sanotun informaatioarvoa, ilmaista puhujan voimakasta tai heikkoa sitoutumista sanomaansa, ilmaista rakenteellisen kokonaisuuden jatkumista tai päättymistä, jne. Väitöskirja sisältää myös kontrastiivisia osia, joissa ilmiöitä verrataan erääseen klassisessa pianomusiikissa esiintyvään melodiseen kuvioon sekä erääseen suomen kielen prosodiseen ilmiöön. Tulokset viittaavat siihen, että tietynlaista melodista kuviota käytetään samankaltaisena jäsentämiskeinona sekä puheessa että klassisessa musiikissa. Lisäksi tulokset antavat viitteitä siitä, että tiettyjä melodisia muotoja käytetään samankaltaisten implikaatioiden luomiseen kahdessa niinkin erilaisessa kielessä kuin suomessa ja ranskassa. Yksi väitöskirjan osa käsittelee pisteen ja pilkun prosodista merkitsemistä puheessa. Tulosten mukaan pisteellä ja pilkulla on kummallakin oma suullinen prototyyppinsä: piste merkitään tyypillisesti sävelkulun laskulla ja tauolla, ja pilkku puolestaan sävelkulun nousulla ja tauolla. Merkittävimmät tulokset koskevat kuitenkin tapauksia, joissa välimerkki tulkitaan prosodisesti epätyypillisellä tavalla: sekä pisteellä että pilkulla vaikuttaisi olevan useita eri suullisia vastaavuuksia, ja välimerkkien tehtävät voivat muotoutua hyvin erilaisiksi niiden prosodisesta tulkinnasta riippuen.

Language and Letters of the Bluestocking Network : Sociolinguistic Issues in Eighteenth Century Epistolary English

This study deals with language change and variation in the correspondence of the eighteenth-century Bluestocking circle, a social network which provided learned men and women with an informal environment for the pursuit of scholarly entertainment. Elizabeth Montagu (1718 1800), a notable social hostess and a Shakespearean scholar, was one of their key figures. The study presents the reconstruction of Elizabeth Montagu s social networks from her youth to her later years with a special focus on the Bluestocking circle, and linguistic research on private correspondence between Montagu and her Bluestocking friends and family members between the years 1738 1778. The epistolary language use is investigated using the methods and frameworks of corpus linguistics, historical sociolinguistics, and social network analysis. The approach is diachronic and concerns real-time language change. The research is based on a selection of manuscript letters which I have edited and compiled into an electronic corpus (Bluestocking Corpus). I have also devised a network strength scale in order to quantify the strength of network ties and to compare the results of the linguistic research with the network analysis. The studies range from the reconstruction and analysis of Elizabeth Montagu s most prominent social networks to the analysis of changing morphosyntactic features and spelling variation in Montagu s and her network members correspondence. The linguistic studies look at the use of the progressive construction, preposition stranding and pied piping, and spelling variation in terms of preterite and past participle endings in the regular paradigm (-ed, - d, -d, - t, -t) and full / contracted spellings of auxiliary verbs. The results are analysed in terms of social network membership, sociolinguistic variables of the correspondents, and, when relevant, aspects of eighteenth-century linguistic prescriptivism. The studies showed a slight diachronic increase in the use of the progressive, a significant decrease of the stigmatised preposition stranding and increase of pied piping, and relatively informal but socially controlled epistolary spelling. Certain significant changes in Elizabeth Montagu s language use over the years could be attributed to her increasingly prominent social standing and the changes in her social networks, and the strength of ties correlated strongly with the use of the progressive in the Bluestocking Corpus. Gender, social rank, and register in terms of kinship/friendship had a significant influence in language use, and an effect of prescriptivism could also be detected. Elizabeth Montagu s network ties resulted in language variation in terms of network membership, her own position in a given network, and the social factors that controlled eighteenth-century interaction. When all the network ties are strong, linguistic variation seems to be essentially linked to the social variables of the informants.

Patterns of Transcendence : Classical Myth in Marina Tsvetaeva's Poetry of the 1920s

This study examines the position and meaning of Classical mythological plots, themes and characters in the oeuvre of the Russian Modernist poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941). The material consists of lyric poems from the collection Posle Rossii (1928) and two longer lyrical tragedies, Ariadna (1924) and Fedra (1927). These works are examined in the context of Russian Modernism and Tsvetaeva s own poetic development, also taking into account the author s biography, namely, her correspondence with Boris Pasternak. Tsvetaeva s appropriations of the myths enter into a dialogue with the Classical tradition and with the earlier Russian and Western literary manifestations of the source material. Her Classical texts are inextricably linked with her own authorial myth, they are used to project both her ideas about poetry as well as the authored self of her poems. An important context for Tsvetaeva s application of the Classical myths is the concept of the Platonic ladder of Eros. This plot evokes the process of transcendence of the mortal subject into the immaterial realm and is applied by the author as an extended metaphor of the poet s birth. Emphasizing the dialectical movement between the earthly and the divine, Tsvetaeva s Classical personae foreground various positions of the individual between these two realms. By means of kaleidoscopic reformulations of similar metaphors and concepts, Tsvetaeva s mythological poems illustrate the poet s position between the material and the immaterial and the various consequences of this dichotomy on the creative mission. At the heart of Tsvetaeva s appropriation of the Sibyl, Phaedra, Eurydice and Ariadne is the tension between the body and disembodiment. The two lyrical tragedies develop the dichotomous worldview further, nevertheless emphasizing the dual perspective of the divine and the earthly realms: immaterial existence is often evaluated from a material perspective and vice versa. The Platonic subtext is central for Ariadna, focussing on Theseus development from an earthly hero to a spiritual one. Fedra concentrates on Phaedra s divinely induced physical passion, which is nevertheless evoked in a creative light.

Literaturnaja skazka A.M. Remizova (1900-1920-e gody)

Literary tale of A.M. Remizov (1900’s – 1920’s) The thesis is devoted to a detailed historical-literary description of a tale as a genre tradition in the creative work of Alexei Mikhailovich Remizov (1877-1957), one of the major Russian prose writers of the 20’s century. This very approach allows to specify the place and functional meaning of this genre in literary practice of the writer and to appeal to one of the key problems of the 20-21 century literature history – a specific of modernistic literature composition principle and a role of montage techniques in its formation. Remizov was working on tales during his whole life, though the most productive years of folklore studies fell to 1900’s – 1910’s. During this period he intensively studied folklore materials, narrated several hundreds of folk tales and in 1900’s – 1920’s published eight tale collections which played a significant role in the formation of stylistic and compositional principles of his prose of the 1910’s – 1920’s, especially montage techniques, which in its turn influenced the development of the narrative forms in the Russian post-revolutionary literature. At the same time a tale has specified not only poetics but also problematics of Remizov’s creative work, as when choosing folklore sources the writer always alluded to modern themes and relevant intellectual trends. The current research work, based on various archive materials and a wide spectrum of modern historical-literary data, complies four chapters with a consistent description of creation history, publication and critics’ reviews of Remizov’s tale collections and single tales contributing to his creative evolution characteristic. Furthermore, the work refers to composition and subject of the particular collections. On the whole it enables to follow up genre dynamics. The first chapter of the work is devoted to Posolon’ (Sunwise), the earliest tale collection of Remizov. The main feature of the collection is that its composition is oriented on the agrarian calendar and the subject – on the system of mythological views reflected in the Russian folklore. This very collection to a large extent corresponds to the writer’s views on the myth represented in Pis’mo v redaktsiyu (Letter to the Editor). The history of this manifesto appearing is analyzed in the second chapter. The incident which caused its forthcoming contributed to ‘legitimization’ of Remizov’s narrations as a relevant genre of modern literature and to upgrading the writer in professional hierarchy. The third chapter analyzes Remizov’s collections of 1900’s – early 1920’s, a result of Remizov’s scrupulous work with a specific tale material. He is acting here as a tale repertory researcher and in some cases as a collector as well. The means of such collections’ topical organization is not the myth but the hero of the tale. According to this principle single pieces are grouped into cycles, which then form complicated montage constructs. Texts themselves can be viewed as a sort of hyper-quotations, as they in fact entirely coincide with their original sources. Besides, collections usually have their own ideal patterns. In the fourth chapter a connection of Remizov’s creative work with folk fun culture and a tradition of the folklore noel story is being demonstrated on Zavetnyie skazy (Secret Tales) material. A consistent collections’ history creation analysis convinces us that the tale was a sort of laboratory in which main writer’s prose methods were being worked out.

Ruumiillinen esine, materiaalinen suku : Tutkimus Pyhä Anna itse kolmantena -aiheisista keskiajan puuveistoksista Suomessa

Embobied Object, Material Family. Late-Medieval Wood Sculptures Depicting Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child in Finland Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, was one of the most popular saints in Western Europe in the late Middle Ages. She was often depicted with two other figures, the Virgin and the Christ Child (Anna Selbdritt). The dissertation examines the polychrome wood sculptures showing this motif, with a special focus on those remaining in Finland. It investigates the meanings these sculptures had to their observers in the fifteenth-century Finland. The study sheds light to important material heritage which is little known and offers new insights into the cult and imagery of the holy grandmother. Methodologically the study is based on iconology and post-formalist art history, and it appropriates concepts such as spatiality, sanctity, corporeality, and gender. Taking a comparative approach it knits together larger tendencies and local people and incidents. By conflating methodological domains it renews the ways how fragmentary wood sculptures, lacking documentary written sources, can be contextually interpreted and comprehended. The sculptures are analyzed from three angles. Firstly, the study explores the sculptures by focusing on their materiality and facture, which is to consider them as records of their own making. The analysis provides new information concerning the quantity, location, and current condition of the sculptures and it also elucidates problems regarding attribution, dating, display, and craftsmanship. The book presents the results of the empirical study of 45 Saint Anne groups; these works are individually described in the large Appendix. Secondly, the works are contextualized to the specific historical conditions in which they were observed. The study discusses closely the circumstances in the Turku Cathedral around the shrine of Saint Anne, the popular belief, and the piety of individual persons. The sculptures, deemed as the embodiments of the holy characters, interacted with the devotees. Thirdly, the works are examined within the wider theological and ideological currents of the era centered on the body and Incarnation. Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child motif demonstrated the Carnal Trinity, the motherly side of the Holy Trinity. The dissertation argues that Saint Anne was interpreted as the female counterpart or, in a mythical sense, wife of God. Furthermore, the Child s implicit, simultaneous presence as a suffering or dead man imbues the sculptures with a sense of the Passion, thus associating them with the pietà and the Mater dolorosa motifs. The naked Christ Child underlines him as the offering and, eventually, the Eucharistic wafer. The study suggests that the sculptures mediate continuity and the bloodline between the generations by the intertwined and repeated gestures, clothing and positions of the portrayed figures. Regardless of the ostensible homeliness of the sculptures, so readily reiterated by earlier scholars, these sculptures represented creation and birth through the carnal yet holy mothers.

Sisustaminen on kuin käsialaa : Carin Bryggman ja Lasse Ollinkari sisustusarkkitehdin ammatissa 1940- ja 1950-luvulla

"Interior Design is Like Handwriting." Carin Bryggman and Lasse Ollinkari as Interior Designers in the 1940s and 1950s My dissertation deals with the emergence of the interior designer's profession in Finland with focus on the 1940s and 1950s, the postwar years of reconstruction and modernism, as the historical context. The topic is addressed at both the collective and individual levels. Specific subjects of study are the training of interior designers (also known as interior architects), the association of Finnish interior architects (Sisustusarkkitehdit SIO), the professional field and its public image and two leading designers, Carin Bryggman (1920 1993) and Lasse Ollinkari (1921 1993). Though respected figures within the field, Bryggman and Ollinkari have otherwise remained little known and studied. My study presents a great deal of new empiria. The main materials consist of the documents of related institutions and the archives of Bryggman and Ollinkari, in which drawings and photographs figure prominently. The drawings illustrate in a new way the variety of professional tasks in the field. My results are also based on a large body of interviewed material. The materials are approached from two theoretical perspectives, with gender and margins as core concepts from the perspective of women's studies. The even gender division of Finnish interior designers revealed a difference with regard to neighbouring occupations and other countries. I claim that the division of tasks was not defined by gender. The second theoretical basis is the sociological study of professions. The high professional status achieved by interior designers is shown by the fact that of the many related titles in Finnish and Swedish, such as "furniture draughtsman" or "interior artist", interior architect became the established one, despite opposition from architects. My hypothesis that the professionalization of interior designers took place during the two postwar decades proved to be correct. The profession emerged through specialized education and became established with the founding of its own professional organization. From the outset, the goal was to mark a distinction between professionals of interior and furniture design and other designers and architects. Interior designers became a strong and successful modern professional group, involved in a wide range of projects from objects to interiors. Keywords: interior designers, interior architects, interior art, occupations, gender, professions, interior design, furniture, home, public space, Carin Bryggman, Lasse Ollinkari, the Sisustusarkkitehdit SIO association, 1940s and 1950s, reconstruction, modernism.

Reconsidering Relativism and Intentionalism in Interpretation : Donald Davidson, Hermeneutics, and Pragmatism

This study focuses on two philosophical issues related to the interpretation of art. Firstly, it considers the role of authorial intentions in interpretation. Secondly, the study raises the issue of relativism in interpretation through a discussion of the relativistic tendencies apparent in the views of three major figures of contemporary philosophy: Joseph Margolis, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Richard Rorty. The major goal of the thesis is to develop a theory of interpretation supporting the role of authorial intentions in interpretation on the basis of Donald Davidson s late philosophy of language and the holistic account of interpretation that underlies different parts of his philosophy. It is my belief that an intentionalist view of interpretation built on Davidsonian elements manages to form the most convincing defense of that interpretive position against the skepticism present in the views of Margolis, Gadamer, and Rorty. The theoretical issues addressed in the thesis are illuminated by discussions of case-examples, most importantly Richard Wagner s The Valkyrie, Thomas Adés America: A Prophecy, and some symphonies by Dimitri Shostakovich. In chapter one, I present a critical discussion of Margolis robust relativism. While finding Margolis criticism of the self-refutive argument plausible, I, nevertheless, argue that the relativistic logic Margolis offers should not be favored in interpretation. The first parts of chapter two outline Davidsonian intentionalism by presenting a reading of Davidson s later work in philosophy of language and mind, and by indicating its relationship to Davidson s views of literature. Then, I shall compare Davidson s ideas with some recent modest forms of intentionalism found in analytic aesthetics, and argue that Davidsonian intentionalism is in many respects more satisfactory compared to them. Chapter three engages Gadamer s hermeneutics by defending E.D. Hirsch s criticism of Gadamer. Uncovering the shortcomings in the replies of Gadamer s followers to Hirsch s criticism serves as a basis for the defense of intentionalism in interpretation carried out in the chapter. That defense is then extended with a discussion of some recent hermeneutic readings of Davidson s views. Chapter four deals with the standing of intentionalism through Rorty s pragmatist approach to literature. By indicating the position of pragmatist notions of aesthetic experience and imagination in Davidsonian intentionalism, it is shown that an intentionalist approach need not be as impoverished with regard to the value Rorty attributes to literature as he assumes. The concluding chapter outlines some ways in which one can be a pluralist with regard to art and interpretation without falling into relativism.

Nuori konservatiivi : Tuure Junnila ja hänen poliittinen toimintansa vuoteen 1956

Tuure Junnila, PhD (1910-1999) was one of Finland's most renowned conservative politicians of the post-war period. Junnila is remembered primarily as a persistent opponent of Urho Kekkonen, a long-term Member of Parliament, a conspicuous opposition member and a prolific political writer. Junnila's ideologies and political views were conservative, and he is one of the most outstanding figures in the history of the National Coalition Party. Junnila also made an extensive career outside of politics, first as an economist and then as an executive of Finland's leading commercial bank Kansallis-Osake-Pankki. The Young Conservative is a partial biography written using traditional historical research methods, which examines Junnila's personal history and his activity in public life up to 1956. The study begins by investigating Junnila's background through his childhood, school years, university studies and early professional career. It also looks at Junnila's work as an economist and practical banker. Particular attention is paid to Junnila's political work, constantly focusing on the following five often overlapping areas: (1) economic policy, (2) domestic policy, (3) foreign and security policy, (4) Junnila and Urho Kekkonen, (5) Junnila, the Coalition Party and Finnish conservatism. In his economic policy, Junnila emphasised the importance of economic stability, opposed socialisation and the growth of public expenditure, defended the free market system and private entrepreneurship, and demanded tax cuts. This policy was very popular within the Coalition Party during the early 1950s, making Junnila the leading conservative economic politician of the time. In terms of domestic policy, Junnila demanded as early as the 1940s that a "third force" should be established in Finland to counterbalance the agrarian and labour parties by uniting conservative and liberal ideologies under the same roof. Foreign and security policy is the area of Junnila's political activity which is most clearly situated after the mid-1950s. However, Junnila's early speeches and writings already show a striving towards the unconditional neutrality modelled by Switzerland and Sweden and a strong emphasis on Finland's right to internal self-determination. Junnila, as did the Coalition Party as a whole, adopted a consistently critical approach towards Urho Kekkonen between 1951 and 1956, but this attitude was not as bluntly negative and all-round antagonistic as many previous studies have implied. Junnila was one of the leading Finnish conservatives of the early 1950s and in all essence his views were analogous to the general alignment of the Coalition Party at the time: conservative in ideology and general policy, and liberal in economic policy.

Luce Irigaray's Philosophy of Feminine Being : Body, Desire and Wisdom

Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born philosopher, psychoanalyst and linguist. Irigaray s concept of woman is crucial for understanding her own work but also for examining and developing the theoretical and methodological basis of feminist theory. This thesis argues that, ultimately, Irigaray s exploration of woman s being challenges our traditional notion of philosophy as a neutral discourse and the traditional notion of ourselves as philosophizing persons or human beings. However, despite its crucial role, Irigaray s idea of woman still lacks a comprehensive explication. This is because the discourse of sexual difference is blurred by the ideas of essentialism and biologism. --- Irigaray s concept of woman has been interpreted and criticized from the perspectives of metaphysical essentialism, strategic essentialism, realist essentialism and deconstructionism. This thesis argues that a reinterpretation is necessary to account for Irigaray s claims about the the traditional woman , mimesis, the specificity of the feminine body, feminine expression and sexual difference. Moreover, any reading should account for the differences between women and avoid giving a prescriptive function to the essence of woman. --- My thesis develops a new interpretation of Irigaray s concept of woman on the basis of the phenomenology of the body. It argues that Irigaray s discourse on woman can and must be understood by an idea of existential style. Existential style is embodied, affective and spiritual and it is constituted in relation to oneself, to others and to the world. It is temporal, it evolves and changes but preserves its open unity in its transformations. Stylistic unities, such as femininity or philosophy, are constituted in and by the singulars. -- This study discusses and analyses feminine existential style as a central theme and topic of Irigaray s works and shows how her work operates as a primary and paradigmatic example of the feminine style. These tasks are performed by studying the mimetic positions available for women and by explicating the phenomenological background of Irigaray s conceptions of the philosophical method, and the lived, expressive and affective body. The critical occupation and transformation of these mimetic positions, the inquiry into the first-person pre-discursive experience, and the cultivation of feminine expressivity open up the possibility of becoming a woman writer, a woman lover and a woman philosopher. The appearance of these new feminine figures is a precondition for the realization of sexual difference. So Irigaray opens up the possibility of sexual difference by instituting and constituting a feminine subject of love and wisdom, and by problematizing the idea of a neutral and absolute subject.

Talousmetafysiikan kritiikkiä

Jakke Holvas: A Critique of the Metaphysics of Economy The research problem of this dissertation is the commonly held opinion according to which everything has become a question of economy in the present day. Economy legitimates and justifies. In this study, the pattern of thinking and conceptualizing in which economy figures as the ultimate reason is called the metaphysics of economy. The defining characteristic of the metaphysics of economy is its failure to recognize non-economic rules, ethics, or ways of existence. The sources included in the study cover certain classics of philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche) and sociology (Karl Marx, Max Weber, Marcel Mauss), as well as the more recent French social theory (Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault). The research methods used are textual analysis and evaluation of concepts by means of historical comparison. The background to the study is given by the views of historians and sociologists according to whom traditional forms have ceased to exist and the market economy become established as the western system of values. The study identifies points of transition from the traditional forms to economic values. In addition, the dissertation focuses on the modern non-economic forms. The study examines the economic and ethical meanings of gift in antiquity in Homer, Plato, and Aristotle. Following Marcel Mauss, the study analyzes the forms and principles of gift exchange. The study also applies Nietzsche’s philosophy to evaluate under what conditions giving a gift becomes an act of exercising power that puts its receiver into debt. The conclusion of the study is that the classics of philosophy and sociology can rightly be interpreted in terms of the metaphysics of economy, but they also offer grounds for criticizing this metaphysics, even alternatives. One such alternative is non-economic archaic ethic. The study delineates a duality between economy and non-economy as well as creating concepts which could be used in the future to critically analyze economy from a position external to the economic system of concepts.