English Abstracts 3/2001

Edellinen sivu

Sisällysluetteloon

Muut lehdet

Etusivulle

• Satu Jaatinen, Advertisements as representations of a country at war during the Finnish Continuation War
  The outbreak of the Continuation War against the Soviet Union in 1941 presented advertisers with new challenges. The cheerful economic upswing of the late 1930s gave way to rationing and ration cards. In conditions of uncertainty, advertising assumed part of the task of helping citizens cope with their everyday problems and inspiring them with hope and patience. Both the woman of the home front and the Finnish soldier at the front were glorified in advertising. The advertisements also give us information on the influence of the turns of the war on people's spirits. At the beginning of the war the ads painted idealised pictures of Karelia regained, while towards the end of the war they consoled the people in the face of a bitter peace treaty.
  
  
• Teemu Taira, The territories of a movie. Religion and communication in My Son the Fanatic
  My Son the Fanatic (1997), a film by the director Udayan Prasad, addresses questions concerning religious fundamentalism and the difficulty of communication in the modern western civilisation pervaded by global influences. Parvez (Om Puri), an immigrant in England with a religious upbringing has become secularised and westernised. But he faces a dilemma when the territory of western standard biography turns out to be just one option in a universe of alternatives where religious fundamentalism and perfect hedonism occupy the shady corners. Through one film, this article deals with the difficulty of communication between the various positions or territories connected with religious and philosophical questions. The writer aims at foregrounding these aspects by analysing the way the different territories resonate in one single cultural product and, more specifically, in its makers and receivers.
  
  
• Kari Nyyssölä, Changing school and conservative rock
  Although the school is basically a conservative institution, it has been quite dynamic in adapting to social changes. One might even state, without exaggerating too much, that it has developed into a reflexive, democratic and socially aware source of knowledge and learning. In contrast, popular music as a cultural institution has lost much of its inborn power of social change, has remained conservative socially, and has been reduced to a set of commodities imbued with superficiality and commercialism. This contrast between school and popular music is the focus of Kari Nyyssölä's article. The main themes discussed in the article include: social values, gender roles, empowerment, and the relationship of social hierarchies and space.
  
  
• Mika Hallila, The novel is a learned monster
  Juha K. Tapio's first novel, Frankensteinin muistikirja (Frankenstein's notebook , 1996), is a Finnish metafictional novel which makes extensive parody of a wide array of literary sources. Untypically for a Finnish novel, it does not address issues of "Finnishness" but instead focusses on questions of literature and literary theory. In the novel, the figure of Frankenstein's monster crystallises one view of the structuration of the novel as a genre. Thus, Tapio's novel makes an ironical statement about theories of literature and writing: Linda Hutcheon's allegorical discourse on metafiction comes to appear in an ironical light when the self-reflexive novel is represented not by Narcissus, as in Hutcheon, but by Frankenstein's monster.
  
  
• Timo Lilja, The power of the gaze - life in visual orders. Interview with Janne Seppänen
  In Janne Seppänen's recent book Katseen voima ('The power of the gaze. Towards visual literacy'. Vastapaino 2001), visual culture appears as much more than just a changing flow of images. It is also, and basically, interaction and nonverbal communication based on the presence and operations of the gaze. The starting-point of the book is that visual reality is always structured and loaded with meanings and norms. In this interview, Timo Lilja and Janne Seppänen discuss the book's main topics, notably the interconnected concepts of visual order and the gaze, as well as the importance of the approach for conceptualising and teaching visual literacy.