33 resultados para Short story
em Helda - Digital Repository of University of Helsinki
Resumo:
This dissertation focuses on the short story Starukha (The Old Woman), one of the last works of the Russian writer Daniil Kharms (1905-1942). The story, written in 1939, is analysed using the Kharmsian concepts èto and to (this and that) as a heuristic interpretative model. The first chapter gives a detailed analysis of this model, as well as a survey of the critical work done to date on Kharms and Starukha. In the second chapter the model is applied to study the different states of consciousness of the male protagonist. This is significant, because he is the "I" of the work, from whose point of view everything is being told. The third chapter takes a closer look at the reality of the world that exists independently of the consciousness of the protagonist. Physical objects can be said to bear - besides their everyday meaning - a hidden symbolic meaning. Similarly, the characters can be considered as representatives of everyday reality and otherworldliness. The fourth chapter deals with the narrative devices of Starukha. The problematics of the relation between fact and fiction plays an essential role in the story. Kharms's use of Ich-Erzählung and different tenses, which contributes to achieving a complicated elaboration of this kind of problematics, is examined in detail. The fifth chapter provides an intertextual reading of Starukha, based on its allusions to the Bible and the Christian tradition. As a result, the whole story can be seen as a kind of meditation on the Passion of Christ. The final chapter examines how the important Kharmsian concepts of the grotesque and the absurd manifest themselves in Starukha. The old woman represents in a grotesque way two opposite systems: the religious and the totalitarian. The absurdity of Starukha can be claimed to be illusory. Therefore, it is better to speak about paradoxicality. Starukha itself is a kind of paradox, in the sense that it tries to say something of the ultimate truth of reality, which inevitably remains ineffable.
Resumo:
The subject of this work is the poetics of «The Wax Effigy», a short novel or novella by Jurii Tynianov, Russian writer, literary critic, historian of literature and prominent literary theoretician. The plot structure of the novel is based upon a real event, the creation by Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli in 1725 of a wax sculpture of the first Russian emperor, Peter the Great. «Construction of the Sham» consists of three chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. Due to the fact that Tynianov was at the same time a prose writer and theoretician of literature it seemed important to consider the reception of his prose and his works on literary theory in relationship to each other. The introduction is devoted to this task. The first chapter is about the history of the creation of the novel and its reception. Tynianov stopped writing one short story in order to write the novel; these two works have some common traits. It seems almost obvious that his work on the first text was a real step toward the creation of the second. In the first story there is an opposition of dead/alive which is semantic prefiguring of a central motif in «The Wax Effigy». An analysis of the reception of the novel demonstrated that almost every critic writing about the novel has described it as nonsense. Critics considered Tynianov's work in terms of «devices» and «content» and could not understand how devices are related to the content of the novel: the novel was thought as a signifier without any signified. Implicitly, critics thought the signified of the novel as a traditional one of the historical novel, as the historiosophical «idea», embodied in the system of literary devices. In this case literature becomes something instrumental, a kind of expression of extraliterary content. In contradistinction to that Tynianov considered literary semantics as an effect of the literary structure. From his point of view the literary sense is immanent to the process of signification accomplished inside the literary text. The second chapter is devoted to a rhetorical analysis of the opposition dead/alive. Tynianov systematically compares both terms of the opposition. As a result of this strategy the wax effigy of the dead emperor becomes «as if» alive and the world of living people «as if» dead. The qualifier «as if» refers to the fact that Tynianov creates an ambiguous semantic system. This rhetoric is related to European Romanticism and his «fantastic literature» (Merimé, Hoffmann, Maupassant etc.). But Tynianov demonstrates a linguistic origin of the strange fantoms created by romantics; he demystifies these idols by parodying the fantastic literature, that is, showing «how it was done». At the same time, the opposition mentioned above refers to his idea of «incongruity» which plays a prominent role in Tynianov s theory but has never been conceptualised. The incongruity is a inner collision of the literary text; from Tynianov's point of view the meaning of the work of literature is always a dynamic collision of semantically heterogeneous elements struggling with each other. In «The Wax Effigy» Tynianov creates a metalevel of the work demonstrating the process of creation of the literary sense. The third chapter is a reconstruction of Tynianov's conception of the historical prose, specifically of the mechanisms by which historical facts are transformed into literary events. Tynianov thought that the task of the historical novelist is to depict his hero as an actor, to demonstrate that as a wearer of many masks he is a creator of appearances, ambiguities. Here, in the «figure of fiction» (Andrei Belyi), the very idea of the historical prose and rhetoric employed in «The Wax Effigy», history and literature meet each other. In his last theoretical work, «On parody» Tynianov writes about the so-called sham structure of parody. In his opinion every parody is a text about other texts and «serious» work which could be read at the same time as a text about «reality». This twofold structure of parody is that of «The Wax Effigy»: that text speaks about ambiguities of the history and about ambiguities of the literary sense, about social reality of the past and - about the working of the literature itself. «The Wax Effigy» is written as a autoreflective text, as an experiment in literary semantics, as a system of literary ambiguities - of hero, rhetoric and the text itself. The meaning of the novel is created not by the embodiment extraliterary idea, but by the process of signification accomplished inside the work of literature. In this sense Tynianov's novel is parody, a break with the tradition of the historical novel preceding «The Wax Effigy».
Resumo:
The dissertation deals with the prose texts of the Finnish writer Timo K. Mukka, renowned for his depictions of his native Lapland. This research concerns the creation of world view in Mukka s prose, which is approached by studying what Mikhail Bakhtin calls generic change. Such genre change is the most characteristic feature of Mukka s prose. His prose is permeated with two genres in particular and changes between them: the ballad-like, archaistic and romantic prose-poem style and naturalistic, even grotesque expressions. In addition, these genres are associated with sublime and grotesque styles so that generic change tends to involve also stylistic changes in Mukka s prose. This study probes the tension-filled interrelationships between the ballad and naturalistic prose by examining the discourse of Mukka s characters. It is shown that these characters invariably find themselves in what Bakhtin calls the chronotope of the threshold; that is, the plots of Mukka s novels and short stories depict situations in which the characters are faced with decisions and deeds that will profoundly impact their lives. The discourse of the threshold affects the characters speech by filling it with dialogical dimensions. This makes their communication ethically loaded and polyphonic. This study is based on Mikhail Bakhtin s theory of the novel and international Bakhtin s studies. I also take into consideration the theoretical developments of Bakhtin s work; for example, the concept of ressentiment, adapted from the Bakhtin scholar Michel André Bernstein, plays an important role. In order to explicate on the psychology of Mukka s characters such as melancholy, abjection, sadism, and taboo I use the concepts familiar from Freudian psychoanalysis. The corpus of my research consists of the following texts: the long prose texts Maa on syntinen laulu. Balladi (1964), Tabu (1965), Täältä jostakin. Romaani (1965), Laulu Sipirjan lapsista. Romaani (1966), Ja kesän heinä kuolee. Kertomus sairaudesta (1968) ja Kyyhky ja unikko (1970) and the short story collections Koiran kuolema (1967) ja Lumen pelko (1970), and with Tabu published short story Sankarihymni , the short story Katkelma laajemmasta laulelmasta from the collection Rakastaa: Kaksitoista novellia rakkaudesta (1965) and also the short stories which were published in various Finnish journals: Yöt (1965), Liisa (1967), Tyttö (1967) ja Näin hetki sitten ketun (1970). I pay particular attention to the novel Maa on syntinen laulu, because it expresses the generic change characteristic of Mukka s world view in a specifically clear and lively way. The dissertation is in Finnish. Key words: Timo K. Mukka, world view, genre change, ballad, naturalism, grotesque realism, Mikhail Bakhtin, dialogism, polyphony, chronotope, sublime, grotesque, ressentiment, Sigmund Freud, melancholy, taboo, abject, sadism, reduced laughter, modern parody.
Resumo:
Under the power of passion. The age of nervousness in Minna Canth s works This research contemplates the psychology of Minna Canth s characters through the historical image of man in late 19th century Europe. The central operative term of the study is passion , understood as a twofold philosophical concept that includes both desire and suffering. The method of this study is historical and contextual. The study interprets the passions and the psychology of Canth s characters as they were understood in their own time. The indicator of the relevant contexts is the realist and naturalist genre of Canth s works. New research on the genre of the time is also the basis of a new kind of psychological approach to Canth s works. The most important context of passion in Canth s works is the positivistic and pathological image of man at the end of the 19th century. Then, passion was widely discussed, and was perceived as a physiological phenomenon that influenced humans neurologically and caused different kinds of physiological symptoms and nervous disorders. But at the same time, passion was understood as a manifestation of human instincts and drives. The naturalistic literature of the day aimed at creating deterministic studies of human morality and psychology following Émile Zola s application of experimental science methods in his writing. The pathological image of man is most explicitly manifested in Canth s formerly unknown short story Lääkäri (Doctor, 1891), in which a doctor who is interested in psychology visits a jail to meet a peculiar criminal, a girl who feels no remorse for her multiple crimes. In other works of Canth the medically motivated viewpoint is more hidden in the deterministic narrative and depiction of the characters. The present study approaches the passion in Minna Canth s works through five thematic chapters, in witch characters are interpreted suffering from blind love, ennui, crippling romantic idealism, melancholy, guilt and nostalgia, and their stories can be prescribed as medical histories which depict the born of the passion and its development towards ruin. All protagonists are also manifestations of their own time. Canth criticises the modern life and its demands as well as social defects through the tragic stories of individuals. The study demonstrates that Canth did not, like previous research has suggested, wait until the 1890s before writing works of a psychological nature but had already written according to the psychological paradigm of her time in Työmiehen vaimo (1885). The social and psychological interests intertwine in Canth s works and are not exclusionary as has formerly been interpreted. Canth is also critical of the medical power implicit in the naturalist experimental method and this shows itself especially in her depiction of working class women.
Resumo:
The grotesque in Finnish literature. Four case studies The topic of the dissertation is the grotesque in Finnish literature. The dissertation is twofold. Firstly, it focuses on the genre tradition of the grotesque, especially its other main branch, which has been named, following in Bakhtin s footsteps, subjective ( chamber ) grotesque, to be distinguished from carnivalistic ( public square ) grotesque. Secondly, the dissertation analyses and interprets four fictional literary works within the context of the grotesque genre, constructed on the basis of previous research and literature. These works are the novel Rakastunut rampa (1922) by Joel Lehtonen, the novel Prins Efflam (1953, transl. into Finnish as Kalastajakylän prinssi) by Sally Salminen, the short story Orjien kasvattaja (1965) by Juhani Peltonen, and the novel Veljeni Sebastian (1985) by Annika Idström. What connects these stirring novels, representing early or full modernism, is the supposition that they belong to the tradition of the subjective grotesque, not only due to occasional details, but also in a more comprehensive manner. The premises are that genre is a significant part of the work and that reading a novel in the context of the genre tradition adds something essential to the interpretation of individual texts and reveals meanings that might otherwise go unnoticed. The main characteristic of the grotesque is breaking the norm. This is accomplished through different means: degradation, distortion, inversion, combination, exaggeration and multiplication. The most significant strategy for breaking the norm is incongruence: the grotesque combines conflicting or mutually exclusive categories and elements on different levels. Simultaneously, the grotesque unravels categorisations and questions our way of perceiving the world. The grotesque not only poses a threat to one s identity, but can also pose a threat to the cognitive process. An analysis of the fictional works is presented as case studies of each chosen work as a whole. The analysis is based on the method of close reading, which draws on both classical and postclassical narratology, and the analysis and interpretation are expanded within the genre tradition of the grotesque. The grotesque is also analysed in terms of its relationship to the neighbouring categories and genre traditions, such as the tragic, the sublime, the horror story and the coming-of-age story. This dissertation shows how the grotesque is constructed repeatedly on deviations from the norm as well as on incongruence, also in the works analysed, and how it stratifies in these novels on and between different levels, such as the story, text, narration, composition and the world of the novels. In all the works analysed, the grotesque reduces and subverts. Again and again it reveals different sides of humanity stripped of idealisation and glorification. The dissertation reveals that Finnish literature is not a solitary island, even regarding the grotesque, for it continues and offers variations of the common tradition of grotesque literature, and likewise draws on grotesque visual arts. This dissertation is the first monograph in Finnish literature research focusing on the subjective grotesque.
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Nature, science and technology. The image of Finland through popular enlightenment texts 1870-1920 This doctoral thesis looks at how Finnish popular enlightenment texts published between 1870 and 1920 took part in the process of forming a genuine Finnish national identity. The same process was occurring in other Nordic countries at the time and the process in Finland was in many ways influenced by them, particularly Sweden. In Finland the political realities under Russian rule especially during the Russification years, and the fact that its history was considered to be short compared to other European countries, made this nation-building process unique. The undertaking was led by members of the national elite, influential in the cultural, academic as well as political arenas, who were keen to support the foundation of a modern Finnish identity. The political realities and national philosophy of history necessitated a search for elements of identity in nature and the Finnish landscape, which were considered to have special national importance: Finland was very much determined as a political entity on the basis of its geography and nature. Nature was also used as means of taking a cultural or political view in terms of, for example, geographical facts such as the nation s borders or the country s geographical connections to Western Europe. In the building of a proper national identity the concept of nature was not, however, static, but was more or less affected by political and economic progress in society. This meant that nature, or the image of the national landscape, was no longer seen only as a visual image of the national identity, but also as a source of science, technology and a prosperous future. The role of technology in this process was very much connected to the ability to harness natural resources to serve national interests. The major change in this respect had occurred by the early 20th century, when indisputable scientific progress altered the relationship between nature and technology. Concerning technology, the thesis is mainly interested in the large and at the time modern technological manifestations, such as railways, factories and industrial areas in Finland. Despite the fact that the symbiosis between national nature and international but successfully localized technology was in Finnish popular enlightenment literature depicted mostly as a national success story, concerns began to arise already in last years of the 19th century. It was argued that the emerging technology would eventually destroy Finland s natural environment, and therefore the basis of its national identity. The question was not how to preserve nature through natural science, but more how to conserve such natural resources and images that were considered to be the basis of national identity and thus of the national history. National parks, isolated from technology, and distant enough so as to have no economic value, were considered the solution to the problem. Methodologically the thesis belongs to the genre of science and technology studies, and offers new viewpoints with regard to both the study of Finnish popular enlightenment literature and the national development process as a whole.
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Tove Jansson (1914--2001) was a Finnish illustrator, author, artist, caricaturist and comic artist. She is best known for her Moomin Books, written in Swedish, which she illustrated herself, and published between 1945 and 1977. My study focuses on the interweaving of images and words in Jansson s picturebooks, novels and short stories situated in the fantasy world of Moomin Valley. In particular, it concentrates on Jansson s development of a special kind of aesthetics of movement and stasis, based upon both illustration and text. The conventions of picturebook art and illustration are significant to both Jansson s visual art and her writing, and she was acutely conscious of them. My analysis of Jansson s work begins by discussing her first published picturebooks and less familiar illustrations (before she began her Moomin books) and I then proceed to discuss her three Moomin picturebooks, The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My; Who Will Comfort Toffle?, and The Dangerous Journey. The discussion moves from images to words and from words to images: Barthes s (1982) concept of anchoring and, in particular, what he calls relaying , form a point of reading and viewing Moomin texts and illustrations in a complementary relation, in which the message s unity occurs on a higher level: that of the story, the anecdote, the diegesis . The eight illustrated Moomin novels and one collection of short stories are analysed in a similar manner, taking into account the academic discourse about picturebooks which was developed in the last decade of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century by, among others, scholars such as Nodelman, Rhedin, Doonan, Thiele, Stephens, Lewis, Nikolajeva and Scott. In her Moomin books, Jansson uses a wide variety of narrative and illustrative styles which are complementary to each other. Each book is different and unique in its own way, but a certain development or progression of mood and representation can be seen when assessing the series as a whole. Jansson s early stories are happy and adventurous but her later Moomin novels, beginning from Moominland Midwinter, focus more on the interiority of the characters, placing them in difficult situations which approximate social reality. This orientation is also reflected in the representation of movement and space. The books which were published first include more obviously descriptive passages, exemplifying the tradition of literary pictorialism. Whereas in Jansson s later work, the space develops into something that is alive which can have an enduring effect on the characters personalities and behaviour. This study shows how the idea of an image a dynamic image -- forms a holistic foundation for Jansson s imagination and work. The idea of central perspective, or frame, for instance, provided inspiration for whole stories or in the way that she developed her characters, as in the case of the Fillyjonk, who is a complex female figure, simultaneously frantic and prim. The idea of movement is central to the narrative art of picturebooks and illustrated texts, particularly in relation to the way that action is depicted. Jansson, however, also develops a specific choreography of characters in which poses and postures signify action, feelings and relationships. Here, I use two ideas from modern dance, contraction and release (Graham), to characterise the language of movement which is evident in Jansson s words and images. In Jansson s final Moomin novels and short stories, the idea of space becomes more and more dynamic and closely linked with characterisation. My study also examines a number of Jansson s early sketches for her Moomin novels, in which movement is performed much more dramatically than in those illustrations which appeared in the last novels to be published.
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Objectives. The sentence span task is a complex working memory span task used for estimating total working memory capacity for both processing (sentence comprehension) and storage (remembering a set of words). Several traditional models of working memory suggest that performance on these tasks relies on phonological short-term storage. However, long-term memory effects as well as the effects of expertise and strategies have challenged this view. This study uses a working memory task that aids the creation of retrieval structures in the form of stories, which have been shown to form integrated structures in longterm memory. The research question is whether sentence and story contexts boost memory performance in a complex working memory task. The hypothesis is that storage of the words in the task takes place in long-term memory. Evidence of this would be better recall for words as parts of sentences than for separate words, and, particularly, a beneficial effect for words as part of an organized story. Methods. Twenty stories consisting of five sentences each were constructed, and the stimuli in all experimental conditions were based on these sentences and sentence-final words, reordered and recombined for the other conditions. Participants read aloud sets of five sentences that either formed a story or not. In one condition they had to report all the last words at the end of the set, in another, they memorised an additional separate word with each sentence. The sentences were presented on the screen one word at a time (500 ms). After the presentation of each sentence, the participant verified a statement about the sentence. After five sentences, the participant repeated back the words in correct positions. Experiment 1 (n=16) used immediate recall, experiment 2 (n=21) both immediate recall and recall after a distraction interval (the operation span task). In experiment 2 a distracting mental arithmetic task was presented instead of recall in half of the trials, and an individual word was added before each sentence in the two experimental conditions when the participants were to memorize the sentence final words. Subjects also performed a listening span task (in exp.1) or an operation span task (exp.2) to allow comparison of the estimated span and performance in the story task. Results were analysed using correlations, repeated measures ANOVA and a chi-square goodness of fit test on the distribution of errors. Results and discussion. Both the relatedness of the sentences (the story condition) and the inclusion of the words into sentences helped memory. An interaction showed that the story condition had a greater effect on last words than separate words. The beneficial effect of the story was shown in all serial positions. The effects remained in delayed recall. When the sentences formed stories, performance in verification of the statements about sentence context was better. This, as well as the differing distributions of errors in different experimental conditions, suggest different levels of representation are in use in the different conditions. In the story condition, the nature of these representations could be in the form of an organized memory structure, a situation model. The other working memory tasks had only few week correlations to the story task. This could indicate that different processes are in use in the tasks. The results do not support short-term phonological storage, but instead are compatible with the words being encoded to LTM during the task.
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Whereas it has been widely assumed in the public that the Soviet music policy system had a “top-down” structure of control and command that directly affected musical creativity, in fact my research shows that the relations between the different levels of the music policy system were vague, and the viewpoints of its representatives differed from each other. Because the representatives of the party and government organs controlling operas could not define which kind of music represented Socialist Realism, the system as it developed during the 1930s and 1940s did not function effectively enough in order to create such a centralised control of Soviet music, still less could Soviet operas fulfil the highly ambiguous aesthetics of Socialist Realism. I show that musical discussions developed as bureaucratic ritualistic arenas, where it became more important to reveal the heretical composers, making scapegoats of them, and requiring them to perform self-criticism, than to give directions on how to reach the artistic goals of Socialist Realism. When one opera was found to be unacceptable, this lead to a strengthening of control by the party leadership, which lead to more operas, one after the other, to be revealed as failures. I have studied the control of the composition, staging and reception of the opera case-studies, which remain obscure in the West despite a growing scholarly interest in them, and have created a detailed picture of the foundation and development of the Soviet music control system in 1932-1950. My detailed discussion of such case-studies as Ivan Dzerzhinskii’s The Quiet Don, Dmitrii Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, Vano Muradeli’s The Great Friendship, Sergei Prokofiev’s Story of a Real Man, Tikhon Khrennikov’s Frol Skobeev and Evgenii Zhukovskii’s From All One’s Heart backs with documentary precision the historically revisionist model of the development of Soviet music. In February 1948, composers belonging to the elite of the Union of Soviet Composers, e.g. Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, were accused in a Central Committee Resolution of formalism, as been under the influence of western modernism. Accusations of formalism were connected to the criticism of the conciderable financial, material and social privileges these composers enjoyed in the leadership of the Union. With my new archival findings I give a more detailed picture of the financial background for the 1948 campaign. The independent position of the music funding organization of the Union of Soviet Composers (Muzfond) to decide on its finances was an exceptional phenomenon in the Soviet Union and contradicted the strivings to strengthen the control of Soviet music. The financial audits of the Union of Soviet Composers did not, however, change the elite status of some of its composers, except for maybe a short duration in some cases. At the same time the independence of the significal financial authorities of Soviet theatres was restricted. The cuts in the governmental funding allocated to Soviet theatres contradicted the intensified ideological demands for Soviet operas.
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Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on tuottaa uutta tietoa Suomen kansantalouden rakenteesta ja lyhyen aikavälin kehityksestä 1920- ja 1930-luvulla. Tutkimus toteutettiin laatimalla kansantaloutta kuvaava panos-tuotostaulu vuodelle 1928 sekä sen laajennus, panos-tuotosmalli. Aineiston avulla kuvataan kansantalouden rakenteellisia riippuvuuksia, tuotannon avaintoimialoja sekä näiden vaikutusta kansantalouteen. Lisäksi tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan kansantalouden tuontiriippuvuutta sekä tuontitullien vaikutusta hintoihin 1930-luvun laman aikana. Tutkimuksen perusteella voitiin identifioida Suomen kansantalouden avaintoimialat vuonna 1928: maatalous, metsätalous, elintarviketeollisuus, puuteollisuus, paperiteollisuus ja rakennustoiminta. Erityisesti elintarviketeollisuuden vahva rooli kansantaloudessa oli kenties yllättävää, erityisesti kun huomioidaan kuinka vähän toimiala on saanut huomiota osakseen taloushistorian tutkimuksessa. Tutkimus osoitti, että Suomen vienti oli pääomavaltaisempaa kuin tuonti. Vaikka tämän tuloksen tulkinta on varauksellinen, tutkimus pystyi osoittamaan ja kvantifioimaan toimialojen työ- ja pääomapanoksen osuuden tuotoksesta yksityiskohtaisesti. Panos-tuotosmallilla arvioitiin puuteollisuuden, paperiteollisuuden ja rakennustoiminnan ajanjaksona 1928-32 tapahtuneen loppukäytön muutoksen vaikutusta kansantalouteen. Merkittävä havainto on, että rakennustoiminnan loppukäytön muutoksella oli erittäin suuri kasvua vähentävä vaikutus koko kansantaloudessa. Talonrakennusinvestointien romahtaminen aiheutti lähes 13 prosentin tuotannon laskun kansantaloudessa. Vaikutus oli jopa suurempi kuin puuteollisuuden viennin romahtamisen. Tulokset osoittavat toisaalta, että yksityisen kulutuksen merkitys kansantaloudelle oli erittäin vahva. Esimerkiksi puuteollisuuden viennin romahtaminen aiheutti yli 4 % tuotannon vähenemisen mutta huomioitaessa mallissa myös yksityisen kulutuksen väheneminen, oli kokonaisvaikutus yli 10 %. Yksityisen kulutuksen huomioiminen mallissa siis yli kaksinkertaisti toimialojen vaikutukset kansantalouteen. Tulokset vahvistivat aiemmissa tutkimuksissa esitettyjä johtopäätöksiä tullipolitiikasta ja osoittivat maatalouteen läheisesti liittyvän elintarviketeollisuuden olleen eniten suojeltu toimiala kansantaloudessa. Muut kotimarkkinoiden toimialat eivät kuitenkaan hyötyneet tullipolitiikasta lamakauden aikana. Panos-tuotoshintamallilla osoitettiin, ettei tullipolitiikka ollut niin onnistunutta kuin aikalaistutkimuksissa väitettiin, vaan tullit korkeintaan pystyivät hidastamaan hintojen alenemista. Tutkimuksen liitteenä esitetään kaikki keskeiset Suomen kansantaloutta vuonna 1928 kuvaavat tilastolliset taulukot, mukaan lukien käyttö- ja tarjontataulukot, panos-tuotostaulukot, panoskertoimet, Leontiefin käänteismatriisi sekä työ- ja pääomapanoskertoimet.
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Forestry has influenced forest dwelling organisms for centuries in Fennoscandia. For example, in Finland ca. 30% of the threatened species are threatened because of forestry. Nowadays forest management recommendations include practices aimed at maintaining biodiversity in harvesting, such as green-tree retention. However, the effects of these practices have been little studied. In variable retention, different numbers of trees are retained, varying from green-tree retention (at least a few live standing trees in clear-cuts) to thinning (only individual trees removed). I examined the responses of ground-dwelling spiders and carabid beetles to green-tree retention (with small and large tree groups), gap felling and thinning aimed at an uneven age structure of trees. The impacts of these harvesting methods were compared to those of clear-cutting and uncut controls. I aimed to test the hypothesis that retaining more trees positively affects populations of those species of spiders and carabids that were present before harvesting. The data come from two studies. First, spiders were collected with pitfall traps in south-central Finland in 1995 (pre-treatment) and 1998 (after-treatment) in order to examine the effects of clear-cutting, green-tree retention (with 0.01-0.02-ha sized tree groups), gap felling (with three 0.16-ha sized openings in a 1-ha stand), thinning aiming at an uneven age structure of trees and uncut control. Second, spiders and carabids were caught with pitfall traps in eastern Finland in 1998-2001 (pre-treatment and three post-treatment years) in eleven 0.09-0.55-ha sized retention-tree groups and clear-cuts adjacent to them. Original spider and carabid assemblages were better maintained after harvests that retained more trees. Thinning maintained forest spiders well. However, gap felling and large retention-tree groups maintained some forest spider and carabid species in the short-term, but negatively affected some species over time. However, use of small retention-tree groups was associated with negative effects on forest spider populations. Studies are needed on the long-term effects of variable retention on terrestrial invertebrates; especially those directed at defining appropriate retention patch size and on the importance of structural diversity provided by variable retention for invertebrate populations. However, the aims of variable retention should be specified first. For example, are retention-tree groups planned to constitute life-boats , stepping-stones or to create structural diversity? Does it suffice that some species are maintained, or do we want to preserve the most sensitive ones, and how are these best defined? Moreover, the ecological benefits and economic costs of modified logging methods should be compared to other approaches aimed at maintaining biodiversity.
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Plant species differ in their effects on ecosystem productivity and it is recognised that these effects are partly due to plant species-specific influences on soil processes. Until recently, however, not much attention was given to the potential role played by soil biota in these species-specific effects. While soil decomposers are responsible for governing the availability of nutrients for plant production, they simultaneously depend on the amount of carbon provided by plants. Litter and rhizodeposition constitute the two basal resources that plants provide to soil decomposer food webs. While it has been shown that both of these can have effects on soil decomposer communities that differ among plant species, the putative significance of these effects for plant nitrogen (N) acquisition is currently understudied. My PhD work aimed at clarifying whether the species-specific influences of three temperate grassland plants on the soil microfood-web, through rhizodeposition and litter, can feed back to plant N uptake. The methods and approach used (15N labelling of plant litter in microcosm experiments) revealed to be an effective combination of tools in studying these feedbacks. Plant effects on soil organisms were shown to differ significantly between plant species and the effects could be followed across several trophic levels. The labelling of litter further permitted the evaluation of plant acquisition of N derived from soil organic matter. The results show that the structure of the soil microfood-web can have a significant role in plant N acquisition when the structure is experimentally manipulated, such as when comparing systems consisting of microbes to those consisting of microbes and their grazers. However, despite this, the results indicate that differences in N uptake from soil organic matter between different plant species are not related to the effects these species exert on the structure of the soil microfood-web. Rather, these differences in N uptake seem to be determined by other species-specific traits of live plants and their litter. My results thus indicate that different resources provided by different plant species may not induce species-specific decomposer feedbacks on plant N uptake from soil organic matter. This further suggests that the species-specific plant effects on soil decomposer communities may not, at least in the short term, have significant consequences on plant production.
Resumo:
Life-history theory states that although natural selection would favour a maximisation of both reproductive output and life-span, such a combination can not be achieved in any living organism. According to life-history theory the reason for the fact that not all traits can be maximised simultaneously is that different traits compete with each other for resources. These relationships between traits that constrain the simultaneous evolution of two or more traits are called trade-offs. Therefore, during different life-stages an individual needs to optimise its allocation of resources to life-history components such as growth, reproduction and survival. Resource limitation acts on these traits and therefore investment in one trait, e.g. reproduction, reduces the resources available for investment in another trait, e.g. residual reproduction or survival. In this thesis I study how food resources during different stages of the breeding event affect reproductive decisions in the Ural owl (Strix uralensis) and the consequences of these decisions on parents and offspring. The Ural owl is a suitable study species for such studies in natural populations since they are long-lived, site-tenacious, and feed on voles. The vole populations in Fennoscandia fluctuate in three- to four-year cycles, which create a variable food environment for the Ural owls to cope with. The thesis gives new insight in reproductive costs and their consequences in natural animal populations with emphasis on underlying physiological mechanisms. I found that supplementary fed Ural owl parents invest supplemented food resources during breeding in own self-maintenance instead of allocating those resources to offspring growth. This investment in own maintenance instead of improving current reproduction had carry-over effects to the following year in terms of increased reproductive output. Therefore, I found evidence that reduced reproductive costs improves future reproductive performance. Furthermore, I found evidence for the underlying mechanism behind this carry-over effect of supplementary food on fecundity. The supplementary-fed parents reduced their feeding investment in the offspring compared to controls, which enabled the fed female parents to invest the surplus resources in parasite resistance. Fed female parents had lower blood parasite loads than control females and this effect lasted until the following year when also reproductive output was increased. Hence, increased investment in parasite resistance when resources are plentiful has the potential to mediate positive carry-over effects on future reproduction. I further found that this carry-over effect was only present when potentials for future reproduction were good. The thesis also provides new knowledge on resource limitation on maternal effects. I found that increased resources prior to egg laying improve the condition and health of Ural owl females and enable them to allocate more resources to reproduction than control females. These additional resources are not allocated to increase the number of offspring, but instead to improve the quality of each offspring. Fed Ural owl females increased the size of their eggs and allocated more health improving immunological components into the eggs. Furthermore, the increased egg size had long-lasting effects on offspring growth, as offspring from larger eggs were heavier at fledging. Limiting resources can have different short- and long-term consequences on reproductive decisions that affect both offspring number and quality. In long-lived organisms, such as the Ural owl, it appears to be beneficial in terms of fitness to invest in long breeding life-span instead of additional investment in current reproduction. In Ural owls, females can influence the phenotypic quality of the offspring by transferring additional resources to the eggs that can have long-lasting effects on growth.