Other Side of This Life : Death, Value, and Social Being in Thomas Pynchon's Fiction

This dissertation analyzes the interrelationship between death, the conditions of (wo)man s social being, and the notion of value as it emerges in the fiction of the American novelist Thomas Pynchon (1937 ). Pynchon s present work includes six novels V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity s Rainbow (1973), Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006) and several short stories. Death constitues a central thematic in Pynchon s work, and it emerges through recurrent questions of mortality, suicide, mass destruction, sacrifice, afterlife, entropy, the relationship between the animate and the inanimate, and the limits of representation. In Pynchon, death is never a mere biological given (or event); it is always determined within a certain historical, cultural, and ideological context. Throughout his work, Pynchon questions the strict ontological separation of life and death by showing the relationship between this separation and social power. Conceptual divisions also reflect the relationship between society and its others, and death becomes that through which lines of social demarcation are articulated. Determined as a conceptual and social "other side", death in Pynchon forms a challenge to modern culture, and makes an unexpected return: the dead return to haunt the living, the inanimate and the animate fuse, and technoscientific attempts at overcoming and controlling death result in its re-emergence in mass destruction and ecological damage. The questioning of the ontological line also affects the structuration of Pynchon's prose, where the recurrent narrated and narrative desire to reach the limits of representation is openly associated with death. Textualized, death appears in Pynchon's writing as a sudden rupture within the textual functioning, when the "other side", that is, the bare materiality of the signifier is foregrounded. In this study, Pynchon s cultural criticism and his poetics come together, and I analyze the subversive role of death in his fiction through Jean Baudrillard s genealogy of the modern notion of death from L échange symbolique et la mort (1976). Baudrillard sees an intrinsic bond between the social repression of death in modernity and the emergence of modern political economy, and in his analysis economy and language appear as parallel systems for generating value (exchange value/ sign-value). For Baudrillard, the modern notion of death as negativity in relation to the positivity of life, and the fact that death cannot be given a proper meaning, betray an antagonistic relation between death and the notion of value. As a mode of negativity (that is, non-value), death becomes a moment of rupture in relation to value-based thinking in short, rationalism. Through this rupture emerges a form of thinking Baudrillard labels the symbolic, characterized by ambivalence and the subversion of conceptual opposites.

Ystävä sä lapsien : Lasten virret ja hengelliset laulut suomenkielisissä kokoelmissa 1824-1938 ja niiden vaikutus vuoden 1938 virsikirjaan

Ystävä sä lapsien. Collections of Finnish language children s hymns and spiritual songs from 1824─1938 and their influence on the Hymnal 1938. The Hymnal has been the common song book of Lutheran parishes since the 1500s. In the beginning, the congregations sang the hymns from memory led by the choir or the church musician. The fundamentals of Christian faith are taught through the hymns, both in church and in family devotions. The Hymnal was the only song book of the church in Finland until the end of the 1800s. This study attempts to clarify when and by who were spiritual songs and hymns for children written in Finland. Research materials used were all the books I could find (approximately 200), whose headings were for pupils and young children in the home and school circles. The method of study is historical and analytical. In the first chapter, it is explained that children s literature in Finland differentiated from other literature at the end of the 1700s. Eric Juvelius published a small prayer book in 1781 with the prayer Gud, som hafver barnen kär / Jumala joka Lapsia rakasta. From that, after many Finnish translations, the first verse of the hymn Ystävä sä lapsien took shape. The second chapter considers singing instruction in the folk school from the beginning of the 1860s. Textbooks, including songbooks, were produced for the pupils. Some of the first pioneers in producing these materials were the teachers P.J. Hannikainen, Sofie Lithenius, Mikael Nyberg, Anton Rikström and Aksel Törnudd, as well as Hilja Haahti, Immi Hellén and Alli Nissinen, who were all teachers gifted in writing poetry. Several new spiritual songs appeared in the folk school songbooks. Hymns were sung often, especially in connection with church year celebrations. Children s songs in Christian education are discussed in the third chapter. The Lutheran Evangelical Association of Finland recognized children already in its early song collections. The illustrative teaching methods in the folk school influenced the Sunday school activities and especially the Sunday school hymns. Hymns introduced as exclusively for children and pupils which appear in the Hymnal from 1886 and the supplement to the 1923 Hymnal are explored in the fourth and fifth chapters. The study shows that the renewal of church life at the beginning of the 1900s also resulted in an increase of the number of spiritual songs for children. This is also seen in the diverse choice of songs in the supplementary materials from 1923. The final chapter deals with the School and Childhood section of the 1938 Hymnal. The Hymnal committee did not think that the already well known folk school and Sunday school songs received enough attention in the Hymnal. Those songs were, among others, Kautta tyynen, vienon yön, Oi, katsopa lintua oksalla puun, Olen Luojani pikku varpunen, Rakas Isä taivahan ja Tuolla keinuu pieni pursi. Heikki Klemetti, Ilmari Krohn, Armas Maasalo and Aarni Voipio influenced the opinion that the spiritual songs still were not suitable to be sung in church. Hymns for children and pupils were brought into the same line as the entire Hymnal. The same hymn tunes, which were mainly old ones, were used as common settings for numerous hymn texts. No special type of melody emerged for the children s hymns. It was still notable that hymns for children and pupils were collected at all. In addition, the Hymnal committee marked those verses suggested for singing in both the folk school and Sunday school with an asterisk (*) throughout the entire Hymnal.