Romaani mediakritiikkinä

In the article, I examine how the myths and mythological characters of the Kalevala have been transferred from the epic to Johanna Sinisalo's novel Heroes, what kind of cultural and political meanings are created in this intertextual setting, and what literary means are used to produce them. Sankarit comments on the Kalevala, and the commentary can be read on at least two levels: on the one hand, the novel tells of contemporary heroes using the heroic stories of the epic as a basis, thus continuing the Kalevala's poetic song; on the other hand, it refers backwards and reads the epic stories from a new perspective, thus demonstrating both their timelessness and the ambiguity of the heroism they represent.

In the article, I focus on the question of mediation, which proves to be central to the novel. The heroes comment, sometimes quite critically, on the growing importance of the media as a means for the rapid transfer of information, but technological developments and mediatisation are not viewed in an exclusively negative light. The novel uses passages from different text genres embedded in the rest of the text, underlining the importance of the media in the process by which people in modern society acquire and access information. .