Gendering seekers and upstarts in early twentieth-century Finnish literature

The search for truth and spirituality, intertwined with the search for one’s self, has been a perennial theme in arts and literature. In some works of Finnish literature at the turn of the twentieth century, the figure of a person seeking for spiritual fulfilment tended to intertwine with that of the upstart (nousukas in Finnish). At first sight, it might seem odd that these two figures should overlap in literary works, but as I show, especially in early twentieth-century Finnish literature, such cases are not rare, given the wide range of meanings that the word nousukas would denote

Narcissuses, Medusas, Ophelias… Water Imagery And Femininity in the Texts by Two Decadent Women Writers

My concern is the way in which women writers whose work can be characterized as Decadent and/or Symbolist used the figures of Narcissus, Medusa and Ophelia, as well as the imagery of femininity and water. When analyzing this aspect of their work, I am looking at the ways in which these writers created and co-created the Decadent imagery, what strategies they adopted in their representations of woman and the construction of female subjectivity

Symbols of Water and Woman on Selected Examples of Modern Bengali Literature in the Context of Mythological Tradition

Woman-water homology appears in modern Bengali literature (namely poetry) in various aspects: as the archetypal symbol of creation and destruction, symbol of the womb as the beginning and end of life and rebirth (connoting both physical womb and eternal womb), and also of the womb as dark mysteriousness; a symbol of the continuation, preservation of life, symbol of transience and elusiveness, traditional male written poetic symbol of charm and beauty. In the demystifying, subversive (not only female) poetic imagination, it may also construct the symbol of eternal unity with the female principle, articulate a specific concept of female identity

An Analysis of Gap Fill Items in Achievement Tests

AbstractThis article revives the discussion over measurements of validity in criterion referenced (CR) tests. It presents how the principles of Classical Testing Theory (CTT), normally associated with norm-referenced tests, were applied to the Business English achievement tests at the University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic. Firstly, measures of validity in criterion-referenced tests, test purpose, and test specifications are discussed. Next, a 10-item vocabulary gap fill subtest is subjected to a detailed analysis through the use of facility and discrimination indices. Key and distractor analyses of each item are then performed. The insights gained from such analyses are examined in relation to the cyclical test design process of constant review of items so that a high level of standardization is achieved. This paper thus provides teachers with simple tools to build valid language gap fill tests which reflect the criteria of accurate and equitable testing

Seekers of Secret Worlds in Finland’s Early Twentieth Century Literature

In my article, I look at Finland’s early twentieth century literature, concentrating on the work of two writers, L. Onerva (1882-1972) and Eino Leino (1878-1926) from the point of view of modern Western esotericism. As the central notion, I employ the concept of seekership, used lately by Nina Kokkinen vis à vis visual arts. The concept proves most viable when analysing E. Leino’s and L. Onerva’s literary œuvre and the mélange of esoteric, mystic, occult, spiritualist, theosophical and other trends. I give some background to the trend of seekership in Finland’s literature around the turn of the 19th and the 20th century, concentrating mostly on Leino’s work and considering the interaction of the “little” and “great” traditions, i. e. the local tradition of Finnish mythology as manifested in the folk poetry, and the tradition of European literature. In the latter section of the paper, I discuss L. Onerva’s work from the perspective of seekership, concentrating on her ways of gendering the figure of the seeker. My research enters in dialogue with the recent research on esotericism in Finnish cultural history, namely the current project Seekers of the New.</p

Digitaaliset ihmistieteet kirjallisuudentutkimuksessa

Viola Parente-Čapková: Digitaaliset ihmistieteet kirjallisuudentutkimuksess

Telomere Maintenance in Organisms without Telomerase

Biochemistr

Decadent New Woman’s Ironic Subversions: L. Onerva’s Multi-layered Irony

The decadent New Woman novel Mirdja (1908) by the Finnish writer L. Onerva (Hilja Onerva Lehtinen, 1882–1972) is permeated by irony. From the point of view of the eponymous heroine, the conservative bourgeois strata of the fin de siècle Finnish society with their nationalist zeal, their lack of understanding of art, as well as their hypocritical veneration of the ordinary country folk, are ironized in the novel. However, at the same time, ironic gaze is cast to decadent bohemians and their hom(m)osexual bonding, to male aesthetes who indulge in decadent effeminacy and “gender parasitism”, but despise women. The eponymous heroine, an aspiring artist, tries to appropriate the ironic, objectifying gaze of the decadent aesthete, but she is herself ironized by various narrative voices, characterized by the typically decadent dissonance, contrasts, paradox and ambivalence. I am going to show how, in Mirdja, irony, ludic, parodic repetition and e/Echoing function as devices of constructing the decadent female subject, oscillating between various types of acting and masquerading, and being confronted with ethical and political aspects of the surrounding world. I will look at the narrative irony in the text, as well as at ways in which the text ironizes various literary strategies, figures, motifs, ideas and whole genres, intertwining the rhetoric devices of irony with that of parody and intertextuality, so typical of the decadent mode. I am going to show how the multiple ironic voices as well as various levels and hierarchies of irony subvert each other and are supported by the devices of decadent poetics. </p