Research at the Department of Comparative Literature
The Department of Comparative Literature is a vibrant hub for research that features several major multidisciplinary research projects as well as a wide range of individual researchers. We run the SELMA research centre, which focuses on storytelling, experientiality and cultural memory, as well as the international research network Narrative and Memory. The Department is research-oriented, and its research profile is wide-ranging both in its theoretical scope and geographic and temporal reach. Our focus is on contextual approaches to literature.
Research profile
The historical range of the research areas at the Department of Comparative Literature spans from ancient times to the present. Geographically and culturally, they range from British, French, German, Scandinavian and Spanish literature to American, Caribbean, Latin American and African literature. The theoretical scope of the department ranges from theoretical, aesthetical and philosophical literary research to narrative and cultural memory studies, medical and health humanities and research on subjectivity, identity and temporality. Our research topics include, for example, research on reading groups and activist reading, narrative agency and narrative ethics, teaching literature, and authorship in the era of social media, environmental literary studies, issues of gender, sexuality, postcoloniality and intersectionality, as well as research on trauma fiction, comics and the history and theory of the novel.
All of these approaches share the common view that literature functions as a part of society and culture, expressing the historically conditioned human experience, while also critically engaging with and problematising it. Instead of a purely intrinsic perspective towards literature, the discipline emphasises a contextual approach to the study of literature. This does not entail neglecting rigorous structural analysis of literary works, but it does mean seeing literary structures as part of social, historical and literary contexts as well.
International research centre and research networks
The Department of Comparative Literature is host to SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, which focuses on the study of the interrelations between experience, narrative and cultural memory from both a historical and theoretical perspective.
The Department is also host to the international research network Narrative and Memory: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics and is a co-organiser of the NOS-HS project Interpreting Violence: Narrative, Ethics and Hermeneutics (2018–2019).
Research projects
The consortium Authors of the Story Economy between the universities of Tampere, Turku and Helsinki, funded by the Research Council of Finland, studies the impact of social media on 21st-century literature and authors. The contemporary story economy prompts everyone to share their story and rewards for dramatic stories of change and survival, encouraging also literary authors to seek attention with their personal story. Literature is no longer an autonomous sphere allowing for artistic freedom, but instead influenced by digital storytelling platforms. Authors become influencers whose brand ought to reflect sound moral and political commitments. We analyse how 24 authors in 10 European countries deal with the pressures imposed by the story economy in their literary and non-literary texts and analyse the social media responses evoked by these authors with digital methods. We help authors, media actors, publishers and audiences to analytically and critically revision the future of literature.
PI: Markku Lehtimäki
Duration and funding: 2024–2028, Research Council of Finland
Counter-Narratives of Cancer: Shaping Narrative Agency examines different culturally mediated ways of narrativizing cancer and counter-narratives that challenge dominant narrative practices. The research data consists of literary fiction, life-writing, media texts, and texts produced in bibliotherapeutic groups and narrative agency workshops. We reconceptualize cancer in terms of the idea of illness as an unforeseen ability that allows confronting the randomness and connectedness of life. The project enhances public awareness of different ways of narrating cancer and participates in creating more capacious cancer imaginaries that open up new possibilities of agency.
PI: Hanna Meretoja
Duration and funding: 2023–2027, Research Council of Finland
Reading has become a major focus on contemporary discussions on social justice. Activism related to reading has had many forms recently in Finland and internationally (reading hour -movement, Lukemo-project in Finland). However, there is no academic research on Activism and reading, or Activist reading. In the project Intersectional Reading, Social Justice and Literary Activism (INTERACT) we examine reading related activism in the contexts of intersectionality and social justice. In this project, we apply intersectionality in order to increase educational democracy, and our aim is to create solid research-based methods for activist reading. Raising from the long tradition of Black Feminist thinking intersectionality is both a theory and a mode of thinking committed to social justice. In this project, we direct intersectionality’s potential in increasing social justice and educational democracy to the use of literary educators. Our project imagines a form of literary activism and social justice-oriented pedagogy needed in times of complex global systems of inequalities. By analyzing literature and literature related activism we focus on structural inequalities and societal conflicts. Our aims are related to literary studies, intersectional pedagogy, and epistemological challenges related to activism and academic scholarship.
PI: Kaisa Ilmonen
Funding: The KONE foundation’s thematic funding scheme “Language, Power and Democracy” 2022-2025.
Narrative Agency Reading Group Model: Applications for Libraries, Schools, and Hospitals (NARG) kehittää näyttöön perustuvasta Kerronnallisen toimijuuden lukupiirimallista sovelluksia kirjastoille, kouluille ja sairaaloille. Malli vahvistaa osallistujien kerronnallista toimijuutta: kykyä navigoida kerronnallisissa ympäristöissä kriittisesti ja luovasti pohtien vahingoittavia ja hyödyllisiä tarinoita. NARG kehittää (1) Luovan kerronnallisen toimijuuden lukupiirimallin, jolla on kirjastoihin ja kouluihin soveltuva kehityksellinen ja pedagoginen painotus, ja (2) Kirjallisuusterapeuttisen sovelluksen, joka sopii kroonisesti sairaiden tueksi ja ennaltaehkäisevään työhön sairaaloissa ja kolmannella sektorilla. Hanke vahvistaa kirjastonhoitajien, opettajien, kirjallisuusterapeuttien ja kolmannen sektorin ammattilaisten kerronnallista tietoisuutta sekä lukupiireihin osallistuvien, elämänkriisejään työstävien kirjastonkäyttäjien, identiteettejään rakentavien koululaisten ja katkenneita elämäntarinoitaan pohtivien kroonisesti sairaiden kerronnallista toimijuutta ja hyvinvointia.
PI: Hanna Meretoja
Duration and funding: 2025–2026, Research Council of Finland
The project The Novel’s Knowledge focuses on the ever-changing functions and roles of fictional novels along with their authors, in the era of global medialization and commercialization of the 2000s. The functional role of the author in the contemporary media-driven world is evolving, while the social relevance of an author as an intellectual has remained relatively unaltered. The project is interested in how authors of fictional novels take advantage of other forms of media and how the Finnish contemporary novel relates to different modes of knowing and ways of presenting. Scientific facts, audiovisual culture and social media have substantial influences on discourse about literature and literary forms as well as methods and practices of reading. The project, funded by the Kone Foundation, offers tools and capabilities for understanding the evolving functions and modes of expression of the contemporary novel, the stakeholders being the different operators of the literary culture, literary field, and cultural politics.
PI: Markku Lehtimäki
Duration and funding: 2022–2024, Kone Foundation
This interdisciplinary project studies the representation, meaning and value of recovery from illness in culture, medicine and society. It explores the relationship between recovery and narrative from a critical perspective that interrogates narrative’s claim to cure. It argues that recovery functions as an organisational tool of medical and social management that has the power to grant or restrict access to biomedical and economic resources and services, and to systems of care, relationships and freedoms. The data includes fiction and non-fiction literature, film, mass media and social media written in English, French and Finnish languages. The site of research is the University of Turku. The project is linked to the SELMA Centre and the Research Centre for Culture and Health.
PI: Avril Tynan
Duration: 2023–2027
The project investigates literature instruction in Finnish comprehensive and upper secondary education. We seek new approaches to literature education that foster future generations of children and young people as active readers, experiencers, and interpreters of literature. The study examines the continuum of literature education in Finland from the early grades to the matriculation examination, through the lenses of curricula, teaching materials, pedagogical methods, and exam tasks.
In addition to analyzing national curricula, textbooks, and literary works, the project draws on a diverse set of empirical materials. These include video recordings collected during poetry workshops organized for students, interviews with teachers, written role-taking narratives, and student responses from the matriculation examination.
The research is carried out collaboratively by the Faculty of Education and Culture at Tampere University, the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku, and the Faculty of Education at Åbo Akademi University. A particular emphasis is placed on approaches to literature education that foreground literature as a form of verbal art and emphasize experiential engagement and narrative agency with literary texts.
PI: Aino Mäkikalli
Duration and funding: 2025–2029, Research Council of Finland
Finished research projects
The North, including the Arctic, has been regarded as a periphery upon which the centre has reflected itself. In the age of climate change and the exploitation of natural resources it has become a new centre. The project contends that both human experiences and natural spaces are part of the Arctic reality, and both should be analysed with the tools and methods provided by interdisciplinary humanist studies (history, literary theory, linguistics, and environmental studies). The project covers the area between the Baltic Sea and the Arctic Ocean. It highlights questions of power and representation, the relationship between real and imaginary spaces, and utopian and dystopian visions concerning the North. The project asks what the North and the Arctic look like when we investigate them through water rather than land. The project makes use of the concept of aquagraphy, which includes an analytical means of exploring multiple northern waters turned into glaciers, ice, snow, and floods.
PI of the consortium: Markku Lehtimäki (PI of the subproject: Arja Rosenholm, Tampere University)
Funded by the Academy of Finland, 2017–2021
More information on the project’s website
Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory develops ideas and analytical instruments that help researchers, professional groups and non-academic audiences navigate today’s social and textual environments that are dominated by storytelling. We put contemporary literary fiction in dialogue with manipulative stories that are spread on the internet, in order to reveal the dubious relationship that some narratives have with identity, truth, politics, and complex phenomena such as climate change. In order to confront these issues, we reveal the sophisticated story-critical ideas and techniques offered by works of contemporary fiction.
The team in Turku focuses on the uses and abuses of narrative in the construction of lives and identities. Over the past few decades, the notion of “finding one’s own narrative” has pervaded the culture at large. In response, contemporary narrative fiction has increasingly come to reflect on the problematic uses of narrative in identity work. Our team brings into dialogue contemporary story-critical fiction and the broader uses of narrative in contemporary consumer culture in which narrative identity is often understood in narrow, limiting, and commercially motivated ways. It examines the relationship between narrative and identity from two interlaced perspectives: in relation to 1) metanarrativity and 2) the uses of narrative in promoting wellbeing.
The PI of the team in Turku: Hanna Meretoja (other PIs in the consortium: Maria Mäkelä, University of Tampere, and Merja Polvinen, University of Helsinki)
Funded by the Academy of Finland, 2018–2022
This Europe-wide initiative aims to address the concealed hatreds, prejudices and normalised oppressions that are learned through the unhealed and transmitted traumas perpetuated in our everyday lives through seemingly harmless everyday practices. The project’s partners from Finland, Denmark, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Italy will develop and deliver four clusters of local events within their communities. These events will be used to test experiential learning tools (ELTs) and experiential methods to help explain the harmful effects of transmitted collective traumas and how they impact the continued propagation of hatred and vengeance today. The project will develop a transnational blended education platform, offering different experiential and didactic in-class methods and online webinars and didactic videogames.
Project Leader: Hanna Meretoja
Project Coordinator: Nena Mocnik
Funded by European Commission (Europe for Citizens Programme – European Remembrance Strand), 2018–2019
The research project “How to Read? Forms of Reading in Teaching Literature in the Upper Secondary School” explores new ways of reading and teaching literature in classrooms in order to make reading fiction more tempting to adolescents. The research group studies both the theories of reading and the practicalities of teaching literature. The objective is to find new tools for the improvement of how pupils experience their relationship with reading and to survey new approaches to be used in the instruction of literature. The project’s purpose is to explore how ways of reading based on contextual, affective and intersectional theories would work in classroom teaching. The project produces new theoretical knowledge about reading and teaching literature.
PI: Aino Mäkikalli
Funded by the Kone Foundation, 2018–2020