Dies Legibiles I

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Dies Legibiles Undergraduate Journal of Medieval Studies! We are thrilled to share this work with you. During our undergraduate careers in medieval studies, we have been able to read, think, and learn about such varied aspects of the medieval world as religion, science, art, and history. But too often those breakthroughs, thoughts, and conversations remain confined to the classroom and the semester. Our hope is that through this journal, undergraduates from any institution can begin to see that their explorations need not be confined to a grading stack or to a final paper, and need not be forgotten about as soon as the bell chimes. Instead, we want to foster a community where students share their learning, teach each other, and recognize the power of their own writing to grapple with the current academic discourse

Mysterious Minds : The Making of Private and Collective Consciousness in Marja-Liisa Vartio's Novels

Marja-Liisa Vartio (1924 1966) is considered one of the foremost innovators of consciousness presentation in the Finnish post-war modernism. Mysterious Minds explores the portrayal of fictional minds in her novels. It is the first study to examine the subject in depth. The volume suggests alternative methods for reading Vartio’s fictional minds not only as private, solipsist and self-reflective consciousnesses but also as social, collective and interconnected entities. These interacting minds sometimes remain unreadable and mysterious even to characters themselves. The volume is an enjoyable and beneficial read both for students and scholars sharing an interest in recent cognitive and affective narrative studies as well as for everyone interested in Vartio’s oeuvre. Marja-Liisa Vartio (1924 1966) is considered one of the foremost innovators of consciousness presentation in the Finnish post-war modernism. Mysterious Minds explores the portrayal of fictional minds in her novels. It is the first study to examine the subject in depth. The volume suggests alternative methods for reading Vartio’s fictional minds not only as private, solipsist and self-reflective consciousnesses but also as social, collective and interconnected entities. These interacting minds sometimes remain unreadable and mysterious even to characters themselves. The volume is an enjoyable and beneficial read both for students and scholars sharing an interest in recent cognitive and affective narrative studies as well as for everyone interested in Vartio’s oeuvre.Peer reviewe

Worlds Within and Without : Presenting Fictional Minds in Marja-Liisa Vartio's Narrative Prose

Abstract This study examines the narrative tools, techniques, and structures that Marja-Liisa Vartio, a classic of Finnish post-war modernism, used in presenting fictional minds in her narrative prose. The study contributes to the academic discussion on formal and thematic conventions of modernism by addressing the ways in which fictional minds work in interaction, and in relation to the enfolding fictional world. The epistemic problem of how accurately the world, the self, and the other can be known is approached by analyzing two co-operating ways of portraying fictional minds, both from external and internal perspectives. The external perspective relies on detachment and emotional restraint dominating in Vartio’s early novels Se on sitten kevät and Mies kuin mies, tyttö kuin tyttö. The internal perspective pertains to the mental processes of self-reflection, speculation, and excessive imagining that gain more importance in her later novels Kaikki naiset näkevät unia, Tunteet and Hänen olivat linnut. In the theoretical chapter of this study, fictional minds are discussed in the context of the acclaimed inward turn of modernist fiction, by suggesting alternative methods for reading modernist minds as embodied, emotional, and social entities. In respect to fictional minds’ interaction, this study elaborates on the ideas of “mind-reading,” “intersubjectivity,” and the “social mind” established within post-classical cognitive narratology. Furthermore, it employs possible world poetics when addressing the complexity, incompleteness, and (in)accessibility of characters’ private worlds of knowledge, beliefs, emotions, hallucinations, and dreams. In regards to the emotional emplotment of fictional worlds, this study also benefits from affective narratology as well as the cognitive plot theory. As the five analysis chapters of this study show, fictional minds in Vartio’s fiction are not only introspective, solipsist, and streaming, but also embodied and social entities. Fictional minds’ (inter)actions are demonstrated as evolving from local experientiality to long-term calculations that turn emotional incidents into episodes, and episodes into stories. The trajectories of female self-discovery in Vartio’s novels are analyzed through the emotional responses of characters: their experiences of randomness, their ways of counterfactualizing their traumatic past, their procrastinatory or akratic reactions or indecisiveness. The gradual move away from the percepts of the external world to the excessive imaginings and (mis)readings of other minds (triggered by the interaction of worlds and minds), challenges the contemporary and more recent accounts of modernism both in Finnish and international contexts.Tiivistelmä Tutkimukseni Marja-Liisa Vartion romaanituotannosta analysoi kerronnan tekniikoita ja rakenteita, joita kirjailija hyödynsi fiktiivisten mielten kuvauksessaan. Vartion romaanit liittyvät modernistisessa kirjallisuudessa keskeiseksi nousevaan epistemologiseen ongelmaan. Kuinka tarkasti itse, ympäröivä maailma ja toinen ihminen ovat yksilön tunnettavissa? Tätä kysymystä tarkastellaan suhteessa kahteen Vartion hyödyntämään kuvaustekniikkaan, sisäiseen ja ulkoiseen mielenkuvaukseen. Etäännyttäminen ja tunne-elämän pidättyvyys hallitsevat Vartion varhaisissa romaaneissa Se on sitten kevät ja Mies kuin mies, tyttö kuin tyttö. Myöhemmissä romaaneissa näkökulma laajenee yhä enemmän henkilöhahmojen sisäisiin, affektiivisiin maailmoihin. Itsereflektio, kuvittelu ja harhoiksi yltyvä spekulointi lisääntyvät teoksissa Kaikki naiset näkevät unia, Tunteet ja Hänen olivat linnut. Tutkimukseni teorialuku asemoi uudelleen vakiintuneen käsityksen modernistisessa proosassa tapahtuvasta ns. sisäisestä käänteestä. Fiktiivisten mielten tulkintaan tarjotaan vaihtoehtoisia metodeja, joiden avulla on mahdollista tarkastella kirjallisia mieliä paitsi sisäiseen todellisuuteen kääntyvinä tajuntoina myös kehollisten tunnereaktioiden ja sosiaalisen vuorovaikutuksen kautta syntyvinä rakennelmina. Fiktiivisten mielten vuorovaikutuksen analyysissä hyödynnetään sellaisia kognitiivisen kertomuksenteorian käsitteitä kuin ”mielenlukeminen”, ”tajuntojenvälisyys” ja ”sosiaalinen mieli”. Mahdollisten maailmojen poetiikkaa sovelletaan Vartion henkilöhahmojen yksityisten maailmojen ‒ kuvitelmien, tiedon, tunteiden, harhojen ja unien ‒ tulkintaan. Tarinamaailmojen juonellistamista tarkastellaan affektiivisen narratologian ja kognitiivisen juoniteorian tarjoamin apuvälinein. Kuten tutkimukseni viisi analyysilukua osoittavat, Vartion romaaneissa fiktiiviset mielet eivät ole ainoastaan sisäänpäin kääntyneitä tajuntoja vaan myös kehollisia ja sosiaalisesti rakentuvia fiktion tuotteita. Vartion naisten kehitys- ja heräämiskertomuksia tarkastellaan polkuina, joihin vaikuttavat paitsi episoditason kokemuksellisuus myös henkilöiden kauaskantoisemmat tunnereaktiot, joista kertomukset syntyvät: heidän tuntemuksensa elämän sattumanvaraisuudesta, heidän taipumuksensa rakentaa traumaattisille kokemuksilleen vaihtoehtoisia polkuja, heidän halunsa lykätä päätöksentekoa tai kyvyttömyytensä tehdä ratkaisevia päätöksiä. Asteittain tapahtuva siirtyminen ulkoisen todellisuuden havainnoinnista kohti toisten mielten (väärin)lukemista haastaa niin aikalaistulkinnat kuin myöhemmät käsitykset modernismista, sekä suomalaisessa että kansainvälisessä kehyksessä

The Wagnerian Novel: Iterations of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Prose

This dissertation traces Richard Wagner’s influence on the twentieth century Western European novel. Through a close reading of three monumental works: Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Il fuoco (1900), Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927), and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The story of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, as told by a friend (1947), I argue that Wagner’s artistic and theoretical legacy helps set the course for modernist prose. By investigating the vast webs of intertextual references present in these works, this project examines how novelists manipulate multimedia collage, autobiographical incursion, and narrative silence to replicate the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “Total Work of Art” both championed by Richard Wagner in his early theoretical manifesti and deployed, in evolving ways, throughout the composer’s life. I argue that, rather than creating simple allusions to the Wagnerian ideal across media, d’Annunzio, Proust, and Mann strive to reproduce the full spectrum of Wagner’s biographical and operatic spectacle within the confines of the printed page. In so doing, they pioneer revolutionary prose techniques that bring Wagner’s innovations to an audience far beyond the walls of the opera house

Atlantica : contemporary art from Mozambique and its diaspora

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Microbial Communities in Cultural Heritage and Their Control

Cultural heritage plays a key role in understanding the history of humankind; therefore, the adoption of appropriate strategies for its conservation is essential. Microorganisms, such as bacteria, fungi and microalgae, which are usually organized on the surface in microbial communities as “biofilms”, can cause serious problems in the conservation of cultural heritage, making the adoption of prevention and conservation strategies a critical issue. This editorial focuses on studies published within the present Special Issue that present advances in the field of the biodeterioration of cultural heritage caused by microbial communities, with a particular focus on new methods for their elimination and control

The Ecological Comedy : The Case for an Existential Literary Ecology

Human beings are story making animals. Before homo faber came homo symbolicus. Ecological restoration is a restorying. Transitioning to a new world is always a matter of being between stories. We may call these worldviews, standpoints or paradigms, articulating norms and values. We are moving from one view, the materialist, mechanistic and reductionist understanding of the world as some objective datum to a view which sees the world as creative, participatory, animate, and interconnected. In between stories, however, our lives express a certain schizophrenia. We lurch between contrary positions, recognising the right thing to do whilst continuing with practices that, deep down, we know to be wrong. We have bifurcated identities, split from the world, from others and, ultimately, from our own whole natures. Estranged from the Earth, we struggle to see the world that enfolds and sustains us as a sacred community, carrying on with practices that we know to be harmful and exploitative. The problem is that, socially and structurally, we are locked within those destructive patterns of behaviour. We need a new story, one that integrates the material and spiritual dimensions our lives within new patterns of behaviour. This story will not just enlighten and inform but inspire, enthuse, and enliven, motivating people to change their behaviours and reorient their practices for the new Age of Ecology based upon union between the human and earth communities