The non-literary Latin letters. A study of their syntax and pragmatics

This dissertation studies the language of Latin letters that were written in Egypt and Vindolanda (in northern Britain) during the period 1st century BC 3rd century AD on papyri, ostraca, and wooden tablets. The majority of the texts is, in one way or another, connected with the Roman army. The focus of the study is on syntax and pragmatics. Besides traditional philological methods, modern syntactic theory is used as well, especially in the pragmatic analysis. The study begins with a critical survey of certain concepts that are current in the research on the Latin language, most importantly the concept of vulgar Latin , which, it is argued, seems to be used as an abstract noun for variation and change in Latin . Further, it is necessary to treat even the non-literary material primarily as written texts and not as straightforward reflections of spoken language. An examination of letter phraseology shows that there is considerable variation between the two major geographical areas of provenance. Latin letter writing in Egypt was influenced by Greek. The study highlights the importance of seeing the letters as a text type, with recurring phraseological elements appearing in the body text as well. It is argued that recognising these elements is essential for the correct analysis of the syntax. Three areas of syntax are discussed in detail: sentence connection (mainly parataxis), syntactically incoherent structures and word order (the order of the object and the verb). For certain types of sentence connection we may plausibly posit an origin in spoken Latin, but for many other linguistic phenomena attested in this material the issue of spoken Latin is anything but simple. Concerning the study of historical syntax, the letters offer information about the changing status of the accusative case. Incoherent structures may reflect contaminations in spoken language but usually the reason for them is the inability of the writer to put his thoughts into writing, especially when there is something more complicated to be expressed. Many incoherent expressions reflect the need to start the predication with a thematic constituent. Latin word order is seen as resulting from an interaction of syntactic and pragmatic factors. The preference for an order where the topic is placed sentence-initially can be seen in word order more generally as well. Furthermore, there appears a difference between Egypt and Vindolanda. The letters from Vindolanda show the order O(bject) V(erb) clearly more often than the letters from Egypt. Interestingly, this difference correlates with another, namely the use of the anaphoric pronoun is. This is an interesting observation in view of the fact that both of these are traditional Latin features, as opposed to those that foreshadow the Romance development (VO order and use of the anaphoric ille). However, it is difficult to say whether this is an indication of social or regional variation.

Huellas de Eros y Thánatos en la narrativa de Diamela Eltit : La palabra en movimiento en el juego entre tropos, metáforas y deconstrucciones lingüísticas

Väitöskirja analysoi espanjan kielen dekonstruktioita ruumiin metaforista ja troopeista koostuvassa aineistossa chileläisen kirjailijan Diamela Eltitin (1949 -) neljässä romaanissa: Lumpérica (1983), Vaca sagrada (1991), El infarto del alma (1994) ja Los trabajadores de la muerte (1998). Näkökulma on kielen muutoksessa Eltitin proosassa 1980- ja 1990-luvuilla alkaen kokeellisesta huippuvaiheesta 1983, jolloin hän julkaisi esikoisromaaninsa Lumpérica. Tutkimus korostaa Eltitin romaanien historiallista arvoa, kirjallisuuden tapaa murtaa kielen rakenteita ja sitä miten tämä murros kytkeytyy taideteoreettiseen muutokseen kulttuuridiskursseissa. Tutkimus tarkastelee Eltitin kehityskaarta kenraali Augusto Pinochetin sotilasvallankaappauksesta 1973 halki sotilashallituksen kauden (1973-1990) aina kansalaisyhteiskunnan vahvistumiseen ja vuoteen 1998. Tutkimus analysoi ruumiin troopeista ja metaforista koostuvaa tutkimusaineistoa lingvistiikan, kirjallisuustieteen, historian ja sukupuolen tutkimuksen monitieteisessä viitekehyksessä. Sen vuoksi väitöskirja liittyy espanjalaisen filologian, yleisen kirjallisuustieteen, Latinalaisen Amerikan tutkimuksen ja naistutkimuksen oppiaineisiin. Kolme tärkeintä oppiteoreettista runkoa ovat lingvistinen strukturalismi, dekonstruktio ja feministiset kirjallisuusteoriat. Dekonstruktiivinen lähestymistapa tekstiin korostaa kielen merkityksen muodostumisen filosofista perustaa. Se pyrkii selvittämään, miten merkitys muodostuu kirjoittajan, tekstin ja lukijan välillä. Tekstikritiikki koostuu semanttisesta ja dekonstruktiivisesta tekstianalyysistä, jonka metodologisen mallin perusta on tanskalaisen kielitieteilijän Louis Hjelmslevin (1899-1965) kielitieteellinen malli. Väitös ei käytä mallia suoraan, vaan soveltaa sitä kaunokirjallisuuden tutkimukseen. Oppiteoreettisen viitekehyksen osalta tutkimus sijoittuu strukturalismin ja poststrukturalismin murrokseen. Tutkimus korostaa Eltitin radikaalia muotokieltä ja teatraalisuutta, hänen kielensä visuaalisuutta ja ruumiin metaforien eroottista jännitettä, mikä ilmenee mm. falloksen metaforaksi tulkitun hehkuvan valon kuvissa romaanissa Lumpérica. Vanhat kreikkalaiset myytit Éros ja Thánatos kasvavat esille länsimaisen taidehistorian perinteestä ja kontekstualisoituvat uusiksi kielikuviksi Chilen kirjallisessa maaperässä. Ne muodostavat Eltitin taiteellisen tuotannon pysyvän aihepiirin ja luovat teoksiin synkkää ja karua virettä sekä tummia ja eroottisia sävyjä. Tutkimus osoittaa, että Eltit dekonstruoi kieltä, mutta dekonstruktiot eivät ole jatkuvia eivätkä samanlaisia kaikissa romaaneissa. Kielellisten dekonstruktioiden variaatio on laaja eikä Eltit murra kielen syntaktisia ja morfologisia rakenteita kaikissa teksteissään. Tutkimuksen perusteella väitän, että Eltitin kirjoituksesta puhuttaessa useat tutkijat käyttävät epämääräisesti dekonstruktio-termiä. Useiden tutkijoiden toteamus dekonstruktiosta Diamela Eltitin kirjallisessa tuotannossa pysyvänä piirteenä on epätäsmällinen. Sen sijaan dekonstruktiivinen kirjoitus tarkoittaa Eltitillä laajasti vaihtelevaa lähestymistapaa kieleen, mikä ilmenee kehityslinjana hänen tuotannossaan ja eri tavoin jokaisessa teoksessa.

Tyhjä taivas : Georges Bataille ja uskonnon kysymys

Empty Heavens. Georges Bataille and the Question of Religion. The dissertation explores the question of religion in the texts of Georges Bataille (1897 1962), the controversial French avant-garde writer and philosopher. Passionate about religion throughout his life, Bataille devoted to it both critical analyses and personal meditations. In this study, Bataille s multifaceted relationship to religion is interpreted as expressing a passion for radical otherness. Bataille is approached as a characteristically modern thinker who, nevertheless, questions some landmarks of modernity insofar as modernity is interpreted as a triumph of secularization. The dissertation is situated at the intersection of comparative religion and philosophy of religion. Methodologically, the study resorts to theoretical contextualization and concept analysis. Acknowledging that Bataille s writings challenge the assumptions about coherent meaning taken for granted in traditional philosophical analysis, the study also pays attention to the literary means and, in general, the performative level of Bataille s texts. The study constructs three theoretical contexts for Bataille s question of religion first of all, the interpretation of Hegel in the mid-20th century French philosophy. In the first section of the study, Bataille s uneasy relationship with Hegel as mediated by Alexandre Kojève is explored. The motivation of his question of radical otherness is argued to arise from his struggle with the Hegelian Kojèvean notion of negativity. The second context is the dialogue with the Christian mystical tradition. Starting from the analysis of two Bataillean notions, dramatization and contestation , it is argued that, firstly, Bataille s approach to radical otherness is analogous to certain procedures of mystical texts while, secondly, the function of otherness providing no firm foundation in Bataille s texts differs from its function in mystical texts. In the third section of the study, Bataille s quest for otherness is concretized by analyzing his views on otherness of other person, on violence, and on death themes that are brought together in Bataille s lasting interest in sacrifice. Bataille s understanding of sacrifice is proportioned to social scientific and philosophical discussions on sacrifice. It is argued that the commitment to the idea of sacrifice accounts for a partial failure in the Bataillean approach to otherness, the otherness of other person remaining its (at least half) blind spot. The study presents an overview of Bataille s thought on religion. It brings out Bataille s view of the paradoxical fundamental yet impossible role of otherness in the construction of human world, as well as his understanding of religious representations as both covering over and indicating this otherness. It describes Bataille s atheological mysticism as a peculiar modern form of religiosity, as an ambivalent mourning for and exaltation of fundamental loss.

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.

Èto i to v povesti Staruha Daniila Harmsa

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.

Mifopoètika Andreja Platonova v romane Sčastlivaja Moskva

This dissertation focuses on the mythopoetics of the Soviet writer Andrej Platonov (1899-1951) in his late novel Schastlivaja Moskva (Happy Moscow), written in 1932 1936. The purpose of the work is to reveal the mythopoetic world model in the novel, to characterize the most significant features of Platonov's mythopoetics and finally, to reconstruct the author's myth in the novel by placing the novel in the context of Platonov's oeuvre and Russian literature and culture as a whole. The first chapter provides a representation of the problem and methodology of the work, a short overview of the history of creating and publishing the novel, and a survey of critical work on Platonov done to date. The study utilizes a structuralistic-semiotic approach devised by Tarto-Moscow scholars for analyzing mythopoetic texts and applies the methodology of a conceptual analysis of the mythology of language. The second chapter examines the peculiarities of Platonov's mythopoetics, and its relation to the neomythological paradigm of Russian literature. Some special consideration is given to the character of the scientific utopism of Platonov's myth, to the relation of Platonov's mythopoetic world model with mythopoetic thinking and to the syntagmatical, and paradigmatical aspects of Platonov's myth, in particular to the mythopoetical metasjuzhet and the ambivalent binary structure of myth. The third chapter presents a close examination of the mythopoetics of the novel by discerning the motif structure of the novel, analyzing the characters and main thematic oppositions of Platonov's myth in the novel. It is contended that in every textual level Platonov strives for ambivalency which provides an opportunity to discern his poetics as both utopian and antiutopian. The analysis in the fourth chapter of the key Platonovian ideological concepts revoljucia, kommunizm and socializm confirms this observation. The study concludes that Platonov's myth in the novel is based on the mythologema of his early prose, but reflect the gradual transition from early utopian themes to the intimate "humble" prose of the late 1930's.

Imazhinist Mariengof : Dendi. Montazh. Ciniki.

The study is dedicated to the Russian poet and prose writer Anatolii Borisovich Mariengof (1897–1962). Mariengof – “the last dandy of the Republic” – was one of the leaders and main theoreticians in the poetic group of the Russian Imaginists. For his contemporaries, he was an Imaginist par excellence. His Imaginist principles – in theory and practice – are applied to the study of his first fictional novel, Cynics (1928), which served as an epilogue for his Imaginist period (1918–1928). The novel was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988. The method used in the study is a conceptual and literary historical reading, making use of the contemporary semiotic understanding of cultural mechanisms and of intertextual analysis. There are three main concepts used throughout the study: dandy, montage and catachresis. In the first chapter, the history, practice and theory of the Russian Imaginism are analyzed from the point of view of dandyism. The Imaginist theatricalisation of life is juxtaposed with the thematic analysis of their poetry, and Imaginist dandyism appears as a catachrestic category in culture. The second chapter examines the Imaginist poetic theory. It is discussed in the context of the montage principle, defining the post-revolutionary culture in Soviet Russia. The Imaginist montage can be divided into three main theoretical paradigms: S. Yesenin’s “technical montage” (reminiscent of Dadaist collage), V. Shershenevich’s “nominative montage” (catalogues of images) and Anatolii Mariengof’s “catachrestic montage”. The final chapter deals with Mariengof’s first fictional novel, Cynics. The study begins with the complex history of publication of the novel, as well as its relation to the Imaginist poetic principles and to the history of the poetic movement. Cynics is, essentially, an Imaginist montage novel. The fragmentary play of the fictional and the documentary material follows the Imaginist montage principle. The chapter concludes in a thematic analysis of the novel, concentrating on the description of the October Revolution in Cynics.

Ivanov-mistik : Okkul'tnye motivy v poèzii i proze Vjačeslava Ivanova (1907-1919)

The subject of this work is the mysticism of Russian poet, critic and philosopher Vjacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949). The approach adopted involves the textual and discourse analysis and findings of the history of ideas. The subject has been considered important because of Ivanov's visions of his dead wife, writer Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, which were combined with audible messages ("automatic writings"). Several automatic writings and descriptions of the visions from Ivanov's archive collections in St.Petersburg and Moscow are presented in this work. Right after the beginning of his hallucinations in the autumn of 1907, Ivanov was totally captivated by the theosophical ideas of Anna Mintslova, the background figure for this work. Anna Mintslova, a disciple of Rudolf Steiner's Esoteric School, offered Ivanov the theosophical concept of initiation to interpret paranormal phenomena in his intimate life. The work is divided into three main chapters, an introduction and aconclusion. The first chapter is called The Mystical Person: Anthropology of Ivanov and describes the role of the inner "Higher Self" in Ivanov's views on the nature of human consciousness. The political implications of the concepts, "mystical anarchism" and "sobornost" (religious unity) are also examined. The acquaintance and contacts with Anna Mintslova during 1906-1907 gave a framework to Ivanov's search for an organic society and personal religious experience. The second part, Mystics of Initiation and Visionary Aesthetics describes the influence of the initiation concept on Ivanov's aesthetic views (mainly "realistic symbolism"). On the other hand, some connections between the imagery of his visions and symbols in his verses of that period are established. Since Mintslova represented the ideas of Rudolf Steiner in Russia, several symbols shared by Steiner and Ivanov ("rose", "rose and cross") have been another subject of investigation. The preference for strict verse form in the lyrics of Ivanov's visionary period is interpreted as an attempt to place his own poetic creation within two traditions, a mystical and literary one. The third part of this work, Mystics of Hope and Terror, examines Ivanov's conception of Russia in connection with Mintslova's ideas of occult danger from the East. Ivanov's view of the "Russian idea" and his nationalistic idea during World War I are considered as a representation of the fear of the danger. Ivanov's interpretation of the October revolution is influenced by the theosophical concept of the "keeper of the threshold" which occurs in the context of the discourse of occult danger.

Konstrukcija mnimosti : K poètike "Voskovoj persony" Ju. Tynjanova

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».

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.

Tyhjyyden reunalla, helvetin kannella : Yhtenäisen subjektin hajoaminen Saul Bellowin Herzogissa

The study shows that the reading paradigm derived from codes Roland Barthes presented in his S/Z exposes the postmodernic nature of Saul Bellow s Herzog (1964), and embodies in which way the novel is organized as a radical rewriting of modernism and its ideology. I explore how solid, compact and modernistic subject breaks down at every level of Herzog s narration. I actually argue that the heteroglossic novel is representative of an early American postmodern movement in literaure, and it should by no means be dissected narrowly as a realistic or naturalistic novel at all. The intertextual code verifies that the interpretation of Herzog remains inadequate if one doesn t take account of the novel s significant intertextual references to other texts. In fact, even the mind of Moses Herzog, the protagonist of the novel, is a mosaic of citations. It emerges from the dissertation that the figure of Don Quixote follows Moses Herzog as an ambiguous shadow while the professor of history struggles with his anxiety and anguish, and travels in a mentally confused state around the U.S. for five days in the early 1960s, encountering the impending atmosphere of transition as the country is on the threshold of a significant cultural and social change. There is a strong necessity for updated interpretation of Herzog partly because its centrality to Bellow s own career as a writer but mainly because it has been previously read trough modernistic lenses. I shall try to proof in my study that American Jewish Saul Bellow s (1915 2005) Herzog escapes any kind of simple, elemental or essentialistic construction or reading and in real terms it doesn t offer any comprehensive, total or coherent solution or system for those philosophical doctrines it criticizes and makes fun of. The philosophical, conceptual and cultural substance of Herzog does not constitute an independent or autonomous theoretical tract which would have a life of its own. Altough the novel reflects the continuity of Bellow s writing it is clearly some kind of conscious or unconscious experiment during his long career as a writer. He hasn t been so radical before or since the publication of Herzog. It is unarguably his most postmodern novel.The reading paradigm based on specific codes demonstrates how deep into the basic questions of his personal life and existence itself he must dive in oder to find his many ways towards authentic or primordial self in fragmented and shattered world which is constanly rewritten and which makes human being a tourist of his own life. In that ongoing process the protagonist has to accept the ultimate plurality of his mind and self. He must confront that the modernistic definition of identity as a solid, monolithic and stable entity has broken down into different, inconsistent and even contradictory possibilities of identification. Moses Herzog embodies obviously Stuart Hall s description of the postmodern self his identity has turn into a movable feast.

The Letter Collections of Anselm of Canterbury

Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) was a prolific letter writer. The modern edition of his letter collection comprises more than 600 folio-size pages in print and includes 472 letters, the vast majority of which were sent by him. Our knowledge of Anselm’s letters is derived from collections of his letters, for none of his correspondence survives in its original form of individual letters. There was no one canonical version of the collection, and the extant manuscripts generally differ substantially: the largest medieval manuscript witnesses include over 400 letters, while the smallest contain only a few. We know 38 manuscript witnesses, but no authorial manuscript survives. Certain references in Anselm’s letters reveal, however, that he collected his correspondence on at least two occasions while he was still abbot of Bec, and this study proposes that a third collection was possibly made under his supervision in Christ Church. The third collection also covered Anselm’s Canterbury period. Whether the third collection was authorial or posthumous is unclear. Certain contextual evidence and references in letters would suggest that the collection was authorial. If so, the collection was probably a register book, which was started in c. 1101 at the earliest. There is no positive proof that any of the three surviving minor collections may be authorial. Each of these collections was circulating at a very early stage, however, some probably in Anselm’s lifetime. Moreover, the minor collections seem to have been put together from smaller source units, which possibly originated at Bec. The contents of these units suggest very early and possibly authorial origins: the letters are mainly from Anselm’s years as prior of Bec. The critical edition by F. S. Schmitt represents the current phase in the textual tradition of Anselm’s letter collection. This study demonstrates that the value of the edition is weakened in particular by the way in which Schmitt selected manuscripts for collation, doubtless influenced by the fact that he had not established the structure of the tradition properly. Ultimately it is impossible to undertake systematic research on the letter collection on the basis of Schmitt’s edition.

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.

Olen maa johon tahdot : Timo K. Mukan maailmankuvan poetiikkaa

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.