How Fairy Tales Educate and Civilize Us: Ethical Literary Criticism on Fairy Tales

This article first discusses the history and ideology of fairy tales. As Walter Benjamin said in his essay “The Storyteller”, rumors and information were spread verbally, from person to person. So were fairy tales. Through storytelling, the history and experience is spread from generation to generation. So that audience, especially children, gather to listen to the folks and stories about things “long long ago”, sharing the memories and experience of the storytellers. Based on this idea, the article further analyses the utopian function of fairy tales, which depict the feasibility of utopian alternatives by means of fantastic images. Because in the name of fairy tales, anything is possible. Apart from hope and wish, there was dissatisfaction in fairy tales. Ernst Bloch placed special emphasis on dissatisfaction as a condition which ignites the utopian drive, so that it remains a powerful cultural force among the audience, urges them to resist, to change the unreasonable things in the world. At last, it comes to the ethical use of fairy tales with children. Many scholars, like Bruno Bettelheim and Julius E. Heuscher, have done some psychiatric and psychological research on the meaning and usefulness of fairy tales. Different from those, this article mainly talks about the literary education in fairy tales, how the words, characters and plots play a role in education

Kielellisen maiseman tutkiminen monikielisessä suomalaisessa yliopistossa

This thesis investigates the linguistic landscape at a multilingual Finnish university. It explores which languages are used in the signs at the university's city centre campus, how the languages are arranged, how language choices in the linguistic landscape in the studied setting align with the university's language policy, and how international students and staff members perceive the language environment and language policy of the university. In order to provide more thorough answers to the research questions, two types of data were included: linguistic landscape signs and semi-structured interviews. The linguistic landscape data was collected from seven locations around the city centre campus in November 2021 and focused on the signs displayed in public spaces. Seven international MA students and four international teachers were interviewed for their experiences and perceptions of the linguistic landscape of the university. All the interviews were conducted via Zoom between January and February 2022. Content analysis was used as the principal method for data analysis. The linguistic landscape and interview data analysis revealed that multilingualism is a norm in the city centre campus surroundings. The language choice and the order of languages in the signs reflect the disparity in the role and hierarchy of languages. Finnish is the prominent language and the preferred code in the signs, while Swedish and English show less important status. It can be seen that these three languages are displayed in the majority of the signs, which corresponds to the guidance of the trilingual language policy. Although the linguistic environment of the University of Helsinki is considered more multilingual and international than that of other academic institutions with which the interviewees were familiar, it was suggested that the implementation of the trilingual language policy and multilingualism should be taken into account in a broader sense, not only in public signs, but also in everyday communication