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From literary fiction to planning and policy visions, narratives frame, question, and shape the future and our possibilities to act upon it. This paper approaches the question of narrated agency in...

In visions of future New York City, the waterfront appears as a highly symbolic space, a site of possibility and transformation, imbued with complex cultural meanings. Crucial for the understanding...

In Finland, indirect translation (ITr) played an important role as early as the sixteenth century in the formation of literary language. In the late nineteenth century, the first signs of critics condemning ITr began to appear. The stigma of ITr and the focus on the original have cast into obscurity the agency of translators and publishers, but archival material since the nineteenth century shows that publishers gave a free hand to translators doing ITr, who resorted to compilative translation. Kyllikki Villa, an important mediating agent and a translator of Modern Greek literature into Finnish during the second half of the twentieth century, discussed ITr as both translator and critic. Her archival material offers a rich insight into how her attitude towards ITr changed with her role: as a critic, she was wary of ITr; as a translator, she used and advocated compilative and collaborative translation as strategies for dealing with ITr.

This article investigates the transnational and translingual reception of Nordic women’s writing (among authors writing in Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish) in a multilingual country, Finland, around...

Accepted manuscript version. Published version available in South African Journal of Philosophy, 2017;36(2):223-238 Hannah Arendt’s writings concerning individual responsibility create an important – and under-examined – context for reading J. M. Coetzee’s oeuvre, particularly his novel Waiting for the Barbarians. For Arendt, when a society fails to offer ethical codes of conduct to follow, people should determine those codes by themselves, since morality concerns people in their individuality during totalitarian times. Arendt’s ideas bear important similarities to Coetzee’s representation of the magistrate in the novel, as this character struggles to live with his conscience in a totalitarian regime. In Arendt’s world, introspection is only needed when the world around us fails to guarantee moral laws, and even then one should not focus on oneself only, but instead try to focus on the world around us. Coetzee, however, shows through the character of the magistrate how this internal dialogue easily becomes torturous in its nature. If political action is the most important aspect of Arendt’s thinking, then Coetzee shows through the character of the magistrate how modern, conscientious humans cannot just act politically; instead, their action is always marked by their personal weaknesses, including their feelings of inadequacy. Nevertheless, even if Arendt emphasises political action more than Coetzee, who shows that such action is necessarily marked by individual doubt, self-questioning and other personal inadequacies, the reliance on radical thinking, which is at odds with conformism, is a concern they share.

The article discusses selected works by the Western Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch (1927–2011) within the context of the biography battles which peaked during the 1990s. Kroetsch played a critical role in the formation and honing of a distinctive Prairie literary tradition in Canada, and we discuss a series of his poetic and other works published from the 1970s to 2010 which resonate with concerns raised within life-writing and life-writing criticism in the nineties. We focus on the almost obsessive concern with the relationships between self and other, and the seemingly contradictory denial of a stable self which mark the life writing debate of the decade; both evident in all of Kroetsch's writing. Raising the relation between space and selfhood to the fore, the article argues that Kroetsch's work not only questions our ability to know another through writing, but even to know the self. At the same time, we argue that the glimpses of a seemingly stable, autobiographical self that emerge in his w...

This article examines the experience of being seen and analyzes its central role in the formation of a coherent sense of self. Tove Jansson’s short story from 1962, ‘The Invisible Child’, serves as the red thread of the article, and the story is analyzed in the light of Donald Winnicott’s work on social mirroring. The analysis is enriched by the psychoanalytic insights of Veikko Tahka and Heinz Kohut, and complemented by Axel Honneth’s philosophical elaborations as well as by recent developmental findings as presented by Vasudevi Reddy. The article is divided into an introduction and three sections. After summarizing Jansson’s story in the introduction, the first section elaborates and examines different senses of social invisibility. The second section assesses developmental factors that promote social invisibility and highlights the importance of being seen. The third and final section interprets Jansson’s story as an analogy to an intensive therapeutic process, while pinpointing those elements ...

Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives. Comics at the Crossroads, edited by Shane Denson, Christina Meyer and Daniel Stein, collects 16 articles, accompanied by a Foreword, an Introductio...

This article discusses intersections of genres and genders and their theorization in the contemporary literary scene and suggests a queer reading of a short-listed contemporary Finnish novel, written by the well-known author and theatre figure Pirkko Saisio. The aim of the article is to present feminist genre theories, influenced by Bakhtinian conception of genres, Foucauldian and Butlerian theorizations of genders and sexualities, and the critical discussions in queer studies. The article reads Saisio's novel as a demonstration through an adaptation of a theoretical concept, namely genre hybridity, combined with another concept adaptation, gender hybridity. The article concludes by suggesting that although the novel can be seen as a representative of an entirely new literary genre, that is queer literature, it works in its historical context better as a hybrid genre that refuses monolithic genre locations, and this way comes closer to the theoretical concept of the constantly hybrid, transgressing and bo...