Both “The Vanity of Human Wishes” and “The Laughing Heart” are poems for people who have faced hardship. More than that, they are poems for people who have been punched in the face once or twice before, metaphorically and otherwise. In Bukowski’s, there are actually two poems for two kinds of readers and the way you read the final lines (“you are marvelous / the gods wait to delight / in you”) divides the readings in two: one for the beaten and the other for the advertising agency. Johnson’s, on the other hand, is a relentless barrage of cynicism that intentionally fails to resolve into a happy ending — there is one, sort of, but it’s not very convincing. Some find Johnson more optimistic than others.

The most poignant lines of “The Laughing Heart” read: “you can’t beat death but / you can beat death in life, sometimes. / and the more often you learn to do it, / the more light there will be.” It is a poem about resistance and the gods who delight in us are not delighted by our beauty and compliance. They take pleasure in our resilience in the face of hardship, hardships they have orchestrated themselves. We are not marvelous and delightful in the daytime talk show vomit-inducing manner of “You have to learn to love yourself!” That’s the trouser company talking. We are marvelous and wonderful when we are able to go on when there is no hope left. Sometimes we need to be reminded of that, and this, I think, is Bukowski’s point.

We all have our troubles, but there is a scale. On one end is the person who has lost a sock or whose boyfriend has forgotten their birthday, and on the other the person who actually needs to be reminded that there is a light somewhere, sometimes. That there is hope even in hopelessness when all hope has been lost. Johnson, following the example of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire, speaks of being resolved to the hardships that just are life. He batters the reader until there’s no hope left, but his point is that we go on nonetheless. His point is that in times of hardship we cannot but go on with a full awareness of the fact that going on is pointless, but perhaps not entirely hopeless. There is a bit of light somewhere in the horizon and we must remain curious about what lies beyond it or we lose everything. We go from failure to failure to delight the sadistic gods Bukowski talks about and we can only laugh, because the futile resistance that makes up our lives is absurd and yet meaningful.

Johnson’s and Bukowski’s poems are poems for the depressed, the scarred and the exhausted. That anyone would think the theme suitable for a trendy commercial is astonishing and much more cynical than anything Johnson or Bukowski ever wrote. It blocks the view of decent gutter-dwelling folk who need poetry like this to get a glimpse of the stars. That kind of cynicism is enough for anyone to despair, but it really has nothing to do with the original sentiment. The original has of course changed quite a bit as it has gone through the pens of Juvenal, Johnson, Bukowski and everyone else in between. However, any reasonable person with a shred of empathy can reach an understanding of it. It may be used to sell products, but we would do well to remember that understanding of this sort cannot be bought or sold like a piece of cloth.

Tommi Kakko

Olisi hyvin tärkeää, että mahdollisimman moni tohtoriopiskelija pääsisi mukaan tilaisuuteen. Pluralin johtoryhmä toivoisi voivansa tällaisten tapaamisen avulla kehittää yksikön sisäistä yhteisöllisyyttä ja levittää yksikön sisällä tietoa kaikesta siitä kiinnostavasta tutkimuksesta, jota yksikössä harjoitetaan.

Pyydämme kaikkia jatko-opiskelijoita ilmoittautumaan Tommi Kakolle (tommi.kakko@uta.fi) keskiviikkoon 23.11. mennessä.

Ohjelma

12.15 Tilaisuuden avaus ja uutta tietoa yliopiston jatkokoulutusuudistuksesta (Jukka Havu, Päivi Pahta)

12.30 Paneelikeskustelu:

Yksikön tutkimusohjelmien esittely (Mari Hatavara, Mona Forsskåhl, Juhani Klemola, Arja Rosenholm)

Tohtoriopiskelijan asema yliopistossa

13.45 Kahvi

TUTKIMUKSEN ESITTELYÄ

14.00 Kieli ja yhteiskunta (Liisa Mustanoja, Mikko Heikkilä)

14.30 Kielen ja kirjallisuuden tiloja (Mervi Miettinen, Tommi Kakko)

15.00 Merkitys, mieli ja kertomus (Liisa Ahlava, Mirja Kokko)

15.30 Kielen rakenteet ja sanasto (Maija Sirola-Belliard, Mikko Höglund)

16.00 Viiniä ja juustoja – aperitiivi perjantai-illan rientoihin (salissa Pinni B 5069)

Tervetuloa mukaan!

TV political satire has been virtually extinct in Russia since the puppet show Kukly (along the lines of the now-defunct UK satirical programme Spitting Image) disappeared from the screens shortly after Mr Putin came to power. Now, though, this kind of satire is making a comeback on the internet. Not all the satire is anti-government, but it is generally irreverent towards authority.

Many questions are regularly raised about the main purpose of political satire. Is it supposed to change the world? Is it used by politicians and activists to topple regimes? To smear politicians to make them unelectable and so change the world? ‘Not really’, would be my best answer to all of the above.

Satire is simply mockery at its core. Even so, there are many things that have to fall into place to produce successful satire. The choice of target is perhaps the crucial second step, the first being the choice of an audience. These Russian satirists seem to have chosen the Kremlin as their target and as their productions are on the internet they can reach a lot of people. One must speak Russian and have an interest in Russian politics, which rules out quite a few people, including me, but the potential audience is still at least 60 million Russians.

At the risk of making eighteenth-century English satire sound relevant to what is going on around the Kremlin, the critical function for satire Jonathan Swift and his contemporaries had in mind applies here as well. What one has to do in order to engage in criticism of a given target is not to engage with it at its own level. To put it simply, one shouldn’t try to beat them at their own game. Instead, one should make fun of the game and all the players. That is the only way not to get involved in an exercise in question begging. In order to soar above, one has to stoop lower.

This can be complicated and there are dangers. Daniel Defoe became famous for his Shortest Way With the Dissenters not because the satire was successful, but because he parodied the rhetoric of his targets, High Church Tories, rather too well. As punishment for engaging in real political talk, he ended up in the pillory. Zizek’s comments about Berlusconi and, indeed, Soviet Russia point out another problem: What if the political system or the politicians already make a mockery of themselves? What is left for the satirist to do when the country is ruled by mockery?

Shaftesbury wrote: ‘Wit is its own remedy’. This means that excesses in wit have a tendency to be corrected by ridicule. Making fun of mockery is not a divide-by-zero situation, nor a postmodern self-reflexive paradox. When satire goes overboard, it can be fixed with more satire. Who does the fixing, against whom and how skilfully is what matters. The best argument wins and this, if one is to believe a number of moral philosophers, will lead to virtue in the end. I’m not sure if this is true, but something like it must occur even in political debate.

The point is that making fun of things and people is very important. It has a use in society and it’s one of the reasons the West values freedom of speech so highly. Even the ancients used to think that the tyrant who is left without critics is in real trouble. His people might be in trouble as well, but what not being made fun of does to the ruler is much worse. Sometimes lack of real critics will lead to something as innocuous as wearing a Cthulhu hat to a royal wedding. But in politics, the criticless tyrant becomes weak and prone to manipulation, the slave of his flatterers.

Tommi Kakko

At one of these meetings, it was brought to our attention that we had to decide who was to be the director of the managers of the department’s new subdepartmental heads. When it was asked what it is that the director of the managers of the department’s subdepartmental heads actually does, we were informed that the job of the director would be to direct the managers of the department’s subdepartmental heads, both of them. I’ve embellished the minutes slightly to protect the innocent, but it was something along those lines and we ended up laughing at the tautology presented to us as an answer. Of course, that was the only answer to be had, since we are in the middle of restructuring the giant jigsaw puzzle that is our university and sometimes we find ourselves at a point where there is clearly a piece missing.

The decision was made and we moved on, but the weird afterglow of the tautology was enough to distract the easily distracted mind. I remembered the wording of a rule concerning subordinate clauses in one of the half a dozen Latin grammars I’ve bought and never read through: ‘Subordinate clauses in both Latin and English are introduced by a wide variety of subordinating conjunctions. A subordinating conjunction is a conjunction that introduces a subordinate clause’. It then goes on to list some of the subordinating conjunctions that are conjunctions and introduce subordinate clauses. The book is Yale’s Learn to Read Latin, an otherwise excellent read I would recommend to anyone who wants to learn to read Latin. For example, it says that Latin has only six tenses in the indicative mood although ‘it would have been most efficient if Latin had had nine tenses corresponding to the nine possible combinations of time and aspect’. The possibility is noted, gracefully negated and much inquisitive, some would say neurotic, googling is averted.

There are people who are excellent in taking in tautological information, organizing it and processing it into something useful. I’m not one of them. It seems suspicious, it does not seem like information at all, but a trick of some sort that puts an end to discussion, a formula whose purpose is to fix the rules without actually understanding the rules. Questions must cease, one has to move on and waste no more time on matters that have been resolved. Tautologies, philosophers tell us, are secure in their truth, but they do not actually mean anything: they represent certainty without meaning. The warm laughter that echoed in the room was perhaps caused by this meaningless tautological certainty — it is quite wonderful in its own pedantic way. It could have also been caused by the knowledge that after the meeting we could exit the world of administration until next time and get back to that other part of university life where certainty counts for very little and meaningful questions rule the day.

Have a great semester!

Tommi Kakko

Oma monografiamuotoinen tutkimukseni kauhun kokemuksesta intermediaalisena ilmiönä romantiikan ja modernismin kirjallisuudessa keskittyy kuvan ja sanan välisten suhteiden analysointiin. Kun vuosi sitten pähkäilin, mitkä ulkomaiset yliopistot voisivat olla kiinnostuneita työstäni, Westminsterin englannin laitoksen yhteydessä toimivan Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culturen (IMCC) vahvat visuaalisen kulttuurin tutkimuksen perinteet houkuttivat kysymään ensin heiltä. Ja heti tärppäsi. Koska verkostojaan tulee hyödyntää, entiset tutkimuskontaktini laitoksen johtoportaaseen ja Westminsteriin vuosi sitten siirtyneeseen väitöskirjaohjaajaani olivat luonnollisesti pelkkää plussaa.

Meneillään olevan vierailuni Westminsteriin teki mahdolliseksi Säätiöiden post doc -pooli – yksityisten suomalaisten rahoitustahojen uusi yhteishanke, joka tukee nuorten intomielten lähtöä ulkomailla tehtävää tutkimusta varten. Alfred Kordelinin säätiö rahoittaa minun tekemiseni ja olemiseni tämän vuoden ajan, ja järjestelyn iso etu on, että sain laskea tukisummani suuruuden itse, joustavasti. Suosittelen ehdottomasti jokaisen väitöstään viimeistelevän pluralilaisen harkitsevan oman anomuksen laatimista poolille, mikäli ajan koittaessa henkilökohtaiset olosuhteet sen vain suovat, ja yhteydet ulkomaiseen tutkimuslaitokseen ovat olemassa. Oman toimintansa konkreettinen laajentaminen Suomen rajojen ulkopuolelle kun ei ole koskaan huono idea. Poolin hakuajat ovat tällä haavaa kahdesti vuodessa, keväällä ja syksyllä.

Muutaman kuukauden työskentelyn jälkeen tuntuma on sellainen, että tiettyyn rytmiin on päästy mutta että se ei vielä ihan riitä. Saavuttuani Lontooseen tammikuun lopulla sain hoidettua sellaiset käytännön asiat kuten asumisen ja budjetin kuntoon ripeästi, ja pääsin esittelemään tutkimustanikin laitoksen henkilökunnalle lyhyellä varoajalla helmikuun alussa. Monografian lukemis- ja kirjoitustyö on jatkuvasti käynyt hyvällä sykkeellä, julkaisuja on tullut, ja myös Salmelan Markun kanssa hoitamamme kirjallisuudentutkimuksen Avain-lehden tämänvuotisten numeroiden ja The Grotesque and the Unnatural -artikkelikokoelman toimitustyö on edistynyt ajallaan.

Silti minusta tuntuu, että kaiken sangen ideaalilta kuulostavan oman tutkimustoiminnan ohessa en ole vielä hakenut yhteistyötä paikallisten kanssa riittävän tehokkaasti. Tutut taloudelliset ongelmat ja hallinnolliset muutospaineet näkyvät myös Westminsterin yliopiston toiminnassa, ja ilmeisesti etenkin tämän kevään aikana nämä vaateet ovat rajoittaneet ihmisten tutkimusaktiivisuutta. Kenties tästä johtuen eri seminaareissa ja symposiumeissa on ollut ajoittain hiljaista, ja olen omalta osaltani jäänyt jokseenkin odottavaan rooliin. Vierailut toisten yliopistojen kuten Birkbeckin ja Kingstonin järjestämissä tapahtumissa eivät nekään ole toistaiseksi päässeet rikkomaan rutiinia.

Mikä tahansa tilanne voi silti muuttua, ja päätin kotona vietetyn pääsiäisloman aikana, että enää en odota. Sain idean työpajasta nimeltään ”New Ways of Working with Word and Image”, joka keskittyisi kuvan ja sanan tutkimuksen metodologiaan ja osuisi samaan aikaan W. J. T. Mitchellin kesäkuisen Westminster-vierailun kanssa. Saattaa tietysti olla, että aikataulu on järjestelyyn liian kireä, mutta tiedusteltuani aiheesta IMCC-vastaavat David Cunningham ja Marquard Smith ilmoittivat, että idea on joka tapauksessa hyvä ja realisoitavissa alkusyksystä, jos ei vielä nyt. Palaankin Britanniaan näin kuninkaallisella hääviikolla monta asiaa mielessäni – seuraavaksi aion laatia tarkemman suunnitelman ja selvittää, miten paikalliset työpajat ovat yleensä toimineet. Kustannusvaraa tuskin on paljon muuta tiedossa kuin teetä ja sympatiaa, mutta se ei haittaa. Tavoite nimittäin on tutustua ihmisiin, heidän ajatuksiinsa ja kuvan kokemukseen kielessä.

Jarkko Toikkanen

Beckett is special, because he represents a culmination of a tradition in philosophy and aesthetics that begins with Montaigne, whose Apologie de Raimond Sebond has been called ‘the womb of modern thought’ by the historian of scepticism Richard Popkin. (More recently this topic has been mined by James Noggle and David L. Sedley with very interesting results.) Montaigne’s treatment of Pyrrhonism ends up doubting epistemological certainty. He tricks us into asking whether or not it is the case that ‘Either we can absolutely judge or absolutely we cannot’. The trick here is of course that when we try to do the former, we learn the truth of the latter. It is an ironic reversal that makes Poloniuses (or whatever is the plural of Polonius) of us all. It is also a common figure in satire. Real problems emerge when one begins thinking about how Montaigne’s statement relates to the common-sense middle-of-the-road scepticism with which we might dismiss the absolutes of the either-or question.

The way this relates to Beckett and the reason I like him is perhaps best explained by comparing him to Wittgenstein. The later Wittgenstein, surprisingly, can be read as a satirist. His work is in some sense an illustration of a centuries-old project in philosophy where philosophy tries to catch its own tail in the way pointed out by Montaigne. At its best, it is an illustration of the absurdity of modern efforts to purify thought and language, to square the circle or to create absolute clarity of expression. It’s great fun to view from afar for a while, like watching a man trying to eat his own head, but it soon becomes clear to the reader that the blindness of the targets of Wittgenstein’s mockery and the persistent lack of transcendence have to be dealt with somehow.

After Wittgenstein’s satire, thought begins to appear as nothing more than a series of ironic reversals, argumentative trickery and a juvenile exercise in one-upmanship. Beckett, who said he never read Wittgenstein, somehow strikes at the heart of this modern conundrum and manages to write out the ironies without succumbing to them. As a young writer on aesthetics, Beckett noted that the gap between subject and object is unbridgeable. That is, a painter, for example, cannot take something essential from, say, a flower arrangement, filter the information through himself, the subject, and produce a representation of the flowers on a canvas. What remains after this realisation is the task of describing the failure of representation. The representation, the painting depicting the flowers, is as such a sign of the painter’s failure to represent the flowers. At least for me, this is what much of Beckett’s work is about.

As students of literature we are always told to interpret texts. The inevitable question often raised in modern literary theory is that perhaps all interpretation is, in fact, misinterpretation. We have also been told this countless times. ‘Which one is it?’, one asks. ‘Can we interpret or do we have to think of our interpretations as creative misinterpretations?’ As one can see, Montaigne’s trick is still very much alive and it is very difficult to escape its sphere of influence. I like Beckett, because his work does avoid the omnipresent terror of necessary (mis)interpretation. Because I do not need to interpret it. I might have to interpret it for someone, for example a clever person who asks ‘Isn’t your reading of Beckett’s work as not requiring interpretation an interpretation?’, but that’s different. Beckett is different, because in his writing we can find a calm space for contemplation where such questions become meaningless.

Tommi Kakko

While making this fairly banal point, I mentioned in passing that if one has not read Ovid, one has little hope of understanding Shakespeare. The remark was also going to lead me to the topic of language studies, and especially Latin. However, it was pointed out to me that students do not have to study Latin anymore. I think I knew this, but was in denial. My own Latin studies were not a huge success when I was an undergraduate, but they have proved useful now that I have had to go through neo-Latin texts for my dissertation and actually study the language in earnest simply to be able to continue my work. The more I study, the more convinced I become that students miss out on a lot if they leave university without any knowledge of Latin.

Latin has been called the maths of language studies and I fear I have come to agree. One studying languages without any knowledge of Latin is like a physicist conducting research with no prior knowledge of maths. The analogy is rather melodramatic, sure, but one might also argue that it is in fact an understatement. Latin provides the foundation of the grammars and much of the vocabulary of European languages, but there is more to it. In a post on the Spectator’s blog, Toby Young quotes Llewelyn Morgan who puts it quite well:

‘Latin is the maths of the Humanities’, says Llewelyn Morgan, ‘But Latin also has something that mathematics does not and that is the history and mythology of the ancient world. Latin is maths with goddesses, gladiators and flying horses, or flying children’.

The post also says that Mark Zuckerberg is a Latinist and hence, by some strange implication, a billionaire, but I take it the author is having a bit of fun with this point. It reminds me of overhearing a guide at the National Gallery introducing schoolchildren to Impressionist masterpieces by telling them how many millions each painting is worth. True, but trivial if you are not a Zuckerberg looking for an investment opportunity.

Whether or not the curriculum dictates it, some of us have to learn Latin. There are courses available at our university and I would encourage any student with a serious interest in languages and literature to attend them. If you are not comfortable with group study or cannot get into the courses for whatever reason, you should study on your own. I would recommend Ørberg’s Lingua Latina series, Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer, a good dictionary and a lot of patience for a start. A decent edition of a text that genuinely interests you is also an essential prop for independent study. Alternatively, the Cambridge Latin Course was recommended to me by a classicist friend as more user-friendly than Lingua Latina and while I have not studied the series I do trust her (and her Oxford college’s) judgment. For more grammar, I would direct you to Woodcock’s New Latin Syntax. If you cannot afford a trip to the bookshop, there are online resources such as Textkit which have old out-of-copyright books you can use. Most of the books have a very long shelf life and are still perfectly serviceable.

To quote the sage Jerry Garcia: ‘Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us’. In other words, if the university will not have students study Latin, they will have to know how to do it by themselves. Moreover, they should also know why they should do it. Sometimes guerrilla tactics are in order and the above list provides one route if not through, then into the jungle. If you know of more useful tools, let me know.

Tommi Kakko

I have friends who don’t care about the question and we talk about things like misprints in early editions of Troilus and Cressida, individual authors, literary history, various rhetorical figures, and so on. With philosophers and more philosophical topics, things are of course different. It is interesting to talk about the ways in which 221B Baker Street exists or doesn’t exist, or how meaning and interpretation relate to truth. But even in those discussions, we almost never presume to ask how we are to proceed from our evidence to our conclusions in terms of a theory. Following the reasoning that takes us from one to the other is the actual meat of the conversation and it would be silly to pepper it with pauses where we inquire whose theories and methods we are following.

Wellek’s objection to Leavis reads, in part, as follows:

I could wish that you had stated your assumptions more explicitly and defended them more systematically. . . . I would ask you to defend this position more abstractly and to become conscious that large ethical, philosophical and, of course, ultimately also aesthetic choices are involved.

That is, Wellek wants a more general statement and a defence of the theoretical assumptions behind Leavis’s criticism. Leavis’s response, again in part, reads:

If, as I did, I avoided such generalities, it was not out of timidity, it was because they seemed too clumsy to be of any use. I thought that I had provided something better. . . . I feel that by my own methods I have attained a relative precision that makes this summarising seem intolerably clumsy and inadequate.

There are two points to this part of the rebuttal. First, such general statements are unnecessary. And second, their clumsiness would leave Leavis more vulnerable, if not subject to mockery. There is also a larger question behind the large questions Wellek raises.

Leavis was a Cambridge critic and one can look to a Cambridge philosopher to clarify Leavis’s rebuttal. John Wisdom writes of philosophers’ preference for generality in at least two of his books, Paradox and Discovery (1965) and Proof and Explanation (1991). The influence of the later Wittgenstein is apparent in these works where he juxtaposes what he calls a ‘case-by-case analysis’ or ‘reasoning through analogy’ with a preference for more generalised statements of principle. The latter are favoured by theoretical thinkers for various reasons, but Wisdom claims that a case-by-case analysis of, say, certain Victorian conventions of novel writing supplies as much information as would a more general statement based on these cases. The obvious difference is that with the former you actually have to make the effort of going through the cases and think them through, whereas a general sweep through theory and methodology will supply a quick bird’s-eye view of the terrain. Statements of the latter type appear to do away with much of the actual work of reading and thought that is required to form a deep understanding of a literary topic and this, I suspect, is a big part of their appeal.

This was, following Peter Byrne’s (1979) reading of the exchange, Leavis’s point as well. The role assigned to the explication of a general theoretical stance, creating more clarity and precision, is misleading. Instead of creating precision in interpretation, it glosses over case-by-case analyses and can at best provide the same information as the analyses themselves. Furthermore, composing statements of general principles so that they match concrete examples is difficult in a discipline as fraught with contingencies as literary studies. If one thinks of the function of one’s critical apparatus in these terms, the risks are simply not worth the effort.

What looms in the horizon as one gets into more and more general statements are questions of epistemology and ontology. That is, questions of metaphysics. I think these are the great attractor, so to speak, pulling us away from discussions concerning more specific literary topics. They are questions like ‘How do we know meaning exists?’ and ‘Of what sort of things can we say that they exist and of what sort that they do not?’ If we are to engage with a discipline that requires critical precision, we should at least be aware of the false motives misleading us toward generality.

I recently participated in a panel where someone declared himself a Straussian in response to the theory question. Well, fair enough. To be honest, I was more interested in his reading of a certain Victorian novelist than his use of Strauss’s methods and theories. Or rather I was more interested in what he had to say than what he thought Strauss might have had to say about Victorian novels. If his critical vocabulary got its meaning from Strauss, fine. But Straussian or not, I did wonder if he was aware of the larger question behind the large question he answered with his declaration.

Tommi Kakko

The situation the scholar of dusty old books faces is not of course a new one. In Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, that great prose work of the Stuart age, Bacon says that

the wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter, which is the contemplacion of the creatures of God, worketh according to the stuffe, and is limited thereby; but if it worke upon it selfe, as the Spider worketh his webbe, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed Copwebs of learning, admirable for the finesse of thread and worke, but of no substance and profite.

Here Bacon is of course advancing the cause of empirical science and arguing against the scholar who sits in his chamber writing footnotes to Aristotle’s philosophy. But Aristotle the naturalist who wants to figure out how cuttlefish work is not the target. Rather it is the Aristotelian who, like a cuttlefish, intentionally obscures his language in flourishes of rhetorical ink, or the type of philologist who only deals in ideas and abstractions and never leaves his textual confines to study nature or history.

Bacon’s words can be assigned a place in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. On the surface, the debates of the Quarrel involve the merits of ancient classical learning and modern works of art and science. Sometimes the beginning of the Quarrel is attributed to Dante and it runs through many luminaries of Western thought from Hume, Bentham, Voltaire and Rousseau to Arnold and Huxley. As a modern example in the field of literary studies one could mention Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010). The topic is sometimes put to rest for a period, but it always comes back in some form or another.

More than the merits of old and new scholarship, or whether the West has been in a state of decline since antiquity or progressed to the point where the past can be ignored, the debate to this day concerns the kind of scholar who is an authority on matters of learning. Is it the playwright, novelist, critic, statesman, political theorist, philosopher, rhetorician, historian, economist, philologist, grammarian or some other type of interdisciplinary expert as yet unknown to us? In the study of the classics, the eighteenth-century Quarrel also concerned the way the classics should be studied and by whom. Was it the domain of the cultured rhetorician and man about town or the disciplined scholar in his university library? This was the actual basis of the eighteenth-century dispute, not the relative value of ancient and modern knowledge. More often than not, the issue boils down to a question of present authority.

Perhaps that should be the actual question that needs a reply today. And perhaps the merits of the Quarrel itself also warrant evaluation from the modern perspective. These debates are a very interesting topic of discussion for anyone involved in any literary discipline, but something else should be noted before we get too excited by the intricacies of the arguments and hidden motives of the participants. The fact remains that without knowledge of the debates, left behind in old books, we could not even conceive of the question. That is a quick reply to the question as to why study old books. We would not exist without them. That is reason enough to dust off the old cobwebs, even if it is only to spin fresh ones in their stead. The answer might seem facetious at first, but in that case facetiousness was surely already built into the original question.

Tommi Kakko

Professori Arja Rosenholmin avaussanojen jälkeen Suomen Akatemian edustaja, kulttuurin ja yhteiskunnan tutkimuksen yksikön johtaja Pirjo Hiidenmaa kertoi Akatemian tutkimussuunnitelmamallista. Suurin osa paikalla olleista eivät olleet vielä tutkimuksessaan siinä vaiheessa, että hakemukset Akatemiaan ovat ajankohtaisia, mutta Hiidenmaa keskittyi erinomaisessa esityksessään mallin eri osien selventämiseen, ja tästä oli varmasti hyötyä kaikille kuulijoille. Apurahoja hakeneet tietävät, että usein rahastot ja muut rahoitusta tarjoavat tahot tarkentavat hakuohjeissaan, minkälaista tietoa he haluavat nähdä hakijoiden tutkimussuunnitelmissa, ja usein nämä vastaavat Akatemian mallin vaatimuksia. Vapaamuotoisempia hakemuksia kirjoittaessa on hyvä tietää, että Akatemian tutkimussuunnitelmamallia seuraava ei ainakaan jätä pois tutkimuksen tärkeimpiä tietoja.

Olin itse kertomassa jatko-opiskelijana omista kokemuksistani tutkimussuunnitelman laatimisessa, Kati Lampinen selvitteli tiedekunnan ja laitoksen käytäntöjä ja Anna Wansén-Kaseva kertoi Pluralin verkkosivuista sekä sivujen tutkijakuvauksista. Session toisella puoliskolla me jatko-opiskelijat tutustuimme jo paremmin toisiimme ja kyselimme professori Juhani Klemolalta laitoksen toiminnasta.

Tutkimussuunnitelmia on monenlaisia, mutta ainakin kaksi tarkoitusta voi erottaa toisistaan. Suunnitelmat, jotka kirjoitetaan ohjaajalle ja laitoksen väelle, kirjoitetaan oman kokemukseni perusteella johdattelemaan tutkimusta ja hahmottamaan väitöskirjan argumenttia. Hakemuksiin liitettävät suunnitelmat puolestaan ovat tarkoitettuja laajemmalle yleisölle, ja niiden tehtävänä on selvittää tutkimuksen luonnetta ja tarkoitusperiä joko oppilaitoksille tai mahdollisille rahoittajille. Kärjistäen voisi sanoa, että jälkimmäisillä myydään tutkimusta näille tahoille. Tutkimusta markkinoivaa tekstiä kirjoittaessa tutkimuksen yhteiskunnallista merkitystä voi erityisesti humanistisilla aloilla olla joskus vaikea muotoilla, mutta Hiidenmaa antoi onneksi ymmärtää, että tiedon lisääminen voi itsessään tarpeen tullen toimia myyvän hakemuksen kulmakivenä. Tämä pätee siis Suomen Akatemiaan, mutta luulisin useiden humanistista alaa tukevien rahoittajien ajattelevan samoin.

Eräs kysymys, joka jäi vaivaamaan minua, on tutkimussuunnitelmien arviointi erilaisissa säätiöissä. Rahastot ja säätiöt ovat kasvoton yleisö ja ne käyttävät kasvotonta valtaa ohjatessaan suomalaisen yliopistomaailman tutkimusta. Tiedämme, että monet niistä käyttävät asiantuntijoita hakemusten lukijoina, mutta tutkijan kannalta apurahojen myöntämismenettelyt ovat usein verhottuja mystisiin byrokratiasokkeloihin, joiden toiminnasta on vaikea saada riittävästi tietoa. Jotkin säätiöt kuvaavat kyllä päätöksentekoprosessin omilla kotisivuillaan ja toiset kertovat tarkemminkin millaista työtä heillä on aikomus rahoittaa.

Herää kuitenkin kysymys siitä, kuinka paljon yliopistoilla on oikeasti valtaa tehdä tutkimusprofiiliensa mukaista tutkimusta – ainakaan väitöskirjojen osalta – monien tärkeiden rahoittajien toiminnan ollessa hämärän peitossa. Suunnitellut tutkijakoulut tulevat toivottavasti lisäämään yliopistojen vaikutusvaltaa oman tutkimuksensa suunnittelussa. Toisaalta apurahoja myöntävät säätiöt mahdollistavat näistä tutkimusprofiileista poikkeavat tutkimukset, joten vastarannan maisterin kannattaa pitää mielessä, että hämärästä on mahdollista löytää myös liittolaisia.

Uskon, että monilla aloittelevilla tutkijoilla on samankaltaisia kysymyksiä ja uskon myös, että niihin löytyi käytännöllisiä neuvoja tutkimussuunnitelmapäivään osallistuneille. Sessiot jatkuvat 19.11., jolloin tutkimussuunnitelmien laatijoilla on mahdollista saada palautetta suunnitelmistaan yliopiston asiantuntijoilta. On mielenkiintoista nähdä, minkälaisia suunnitelmia he kirjoittavat ja minkälaisia kommentteja he niistä saavat. Tällä kertaa tutkimussuunnitelman yleisö on tarkasti tiedossa ja he tulevat esittämään kommentteja suoraan tutkijalle. Se on apuraharallissa harvoin mahdollista, joten tilaisuus kannattaa käyttää hyväksi.

Tommi Kakko