Search results for "Moomin"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
Strange vegetation: Emotional undercurrents of Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley in November
2018
This article investigates the emotional undercurrents of Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley in November. I argue that one of the main characters of Jansson’s book is the autumn forest that surrounds the abandoned Moomin house. The decomposing forest is not just an emblem of the inner lives of the guests that gather in the house but is an active character itself: an ambiguous life form that creeps in the house and must be expelled from its living core. I further demonstrate that the emotion of disgust has a crucial role in Jansson’s narrative, and that an adequate analysis of the intentional content of disgust allows us to see what is at issue in the relations between the characters. In my reading,…
'Foreign Readers and the Imperishable Troll' : travelling to locations with connections to Tove Jansson and her works
2022
The following piece is based on the lectio praecursoria presented at the defense of the doctoral dissertation ‘Ideal Absence and Situated Readers: Experiencing Space Through Connection to Tove Jansson and her Works’ which was publicly discussed on November 3, 2021, at the University of Jyväskylä. The full version of the dissertation can be found at: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-39-8861-6. peerReviewed
Tove Janssons bildebok Vem ska trösta knyttet? som heltedikt
2021
Tove Jansson’s Picturebook Who Will Comfort Toffle? as a Heroic Poem
 This article offers an analysis of Tove Jansson’s picturebook Vem ska trösta knyttet? (Who Will Comfort Toffle?) from 1960 as a heroic poem and dramatic monologue, representing an alternative reading to earlier studies of this picturebook as a coherent narrative. Drawing on theory about heroic poetry, poetry and picturebook analysis, we provide a reading that expands those interpretations of Vem ska trösta knyttet? that emphasize the romantic and psychological projects of the book when read as a narrative story. By reading Vem ska trösta knyttet? as a heroic poem, we explore the text as an uttered, ritualistic, and i…
Social mirrors. Tove Jansson’sInvisibleChildand the importance of being seen
2016
ABSTRACTThis 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 …
The Unseen, the Discouraged, and the Outcast : Expressivity and the Foundations of Social Recognition
2018
AbstractThis article analyzes different pathologies of social affirmation and examines the grounds of social recognition from the point of view of the concept of expression. The red thread of the text is provided by Tove Jansson’s fictional works, and the focus will be on three cases in particular (the magic hat, the invisible girl and the figure of the Groke). The article sets out from the phenomenological distinction between the sensible expression, on the one hand, and the expressed content, on the other. By focusing on the three cases, the article distinguishes and analyses the fundamental structures of communal life and explicates different ways in which social affirmation can be one-s…