Monitoring the state of the art in national research is a necessary autocommunication mechanism of a culture. The present overview surveys the monographs, collections, and research articles concerning Estonian literature, which have been published during the period of 2010–2012. The overview is based on the databases ESTER and ISE of the Estonian Libraries Network Consortium. The Estonian subject thesaurus and UDC classificators were used for finding the publications classified as ‘literary studies’. An additional survey was carried out among those articles published in Estonian literary periodicals that were not indexed as ‘literary studies’. The main quantitative findings of our research…

 
The Estonian national epic „Kalevipoeg” (1861) is a literary epic based on folklore motifs, which was created by F. R. Kreutzwald. As part of European romantic literature it stands side by side with Kalevala by Elias Lönnrot. Previous studies of „Kalevipoeg” mainly address the relationship of the epic with Estonian folklore and international myths. Cultural studies emphasize the impetus it gave to the movement of National Awakening in 19th-century Estonia. The present article is focused on the meaning of „Kalevipoeg” as a literary text. The study draws from a corpus of metatexts, which enables the researcher to follow the reception…

 
In 2002, a new word contest was held in Estonia, which resulted in the proposition of eleven new words to replace some of the foreign loanwords often used in the context of European legislation. The main goal of this article was to investigate whether these new words have gone through successful diffusion (as described by E. Rogers, 2003) or whether they have been rejected by the general public. Additionally, through the use of corpora texts, the dynamics of the diffusion could be mapped and compared to the predictions of some recent mathematical models (such as that of Fagyal et al,…

 
There are various contexts and implications for the question „What is poetry?” Genre-theory is only one of them, the self-reflection of poets and the border-policing attempts of literary establishments being the others. In a genre-theoretical attempt at a definition, it is advisable to aspire to terminological precision, although it would put a distance between the argument and everyday usage. Throughout its history the term ‘poetry’ has been used in the following senses: verbal art in general, fiction, all works in verse and lyric. Today, the last mentioned sense seems to prevail. We argue that conceptual consistency is occluded by the…

 
The article seeks to map the literature translated into Estonian over the past decade (2003–2012). As the titles are very numerous the review is mainly focused on book series. Even despite the usual time-period or genre restrictions a series-based approach will contribute to the general picture. First, series enable a cross-language approach. The dominance of English among the source languages is hardly surprising, but fortunately there are also some series contributing to source language diversity. Second, the voluminous nature of most series helps to notice and describe the contribution of different translators, some of which feature an awe-inspiring industry and…

 
The present article highlights some of the problems that occurred in my translating of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s work Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence („Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence”) from French into Estonian.  There is no doubt that every philosophical system has its roots in its author’s native language, and this fact is especially explicit in the works of contemporary French philosophers. Levinas as a major thinker about ethics and one of the initi- ators of the so-called ethical turn in the humanities in the second half of the 20th century, separates ethics from ontology, defining ethical language…

 
The article takes stock of the sustainability of the present language policy in Estonia, asking how capable the ongoing language management is in face of the future challenges of a modern nation state in a globalizing world. The authors offer a critical analysis of the existing technocratic understanding of language policy as a top-down mechanism where political aims are transferred unchanged from decision makers through implementers to passive receivers (language users). Inspired by the writings of some critical sociolinguists and ethnolinguists, the authors propose an understanding of the language policy as a designing tool of the language environment, which is…

 
In Estonian vernacular religion the Lord’s Prayer has several divergent functions. The first historical records of using the Lord’s Prayer as a charm can be found in 17th-century witchcraft reports. According to M. J. Eisen’s folklore collection it is a universal charm that can be used in protective magic, healing procedures, erotic seduction and divination, and occasionally also for harming other people. The Lord’s Prayer may be repeated several times (usually thrice) and the order of the words or letters might be reversed to achieve a stronger effect on the supernatural. The Lord’s Prayer can be read as a separate…

The article is a follow-up to Küsimused eestikeelses infodialoogis I. Küsimuste vorm (2009). The article points out (a) what social actions are performed in the Estonian institutional information-seeking dialogue by means of questions of different categories and forms, and (b) compares the authors’ results with those of a comparative project on questions done at Nijmegen Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. An analysis of everyday dialogues in four Indo-European languages serves as reference material.
 
The article presents an analysis of 859 questions used in phone conversations, drawn from the Dialogue corpus of the University of Tartu and consisting of 282 content (q-word)…

The specifics of the technique of leitmotifs as used by Jaan Kross in his novel Keisri hull („The Czar’s Madman”, 1978) is discussed. According to the tradition of literary theory, leitmotif means a recurrent text element (word, phrase, parallel episodes etc.), which in combination with other analogously recurrent elements serves to build up the specific compositional structure of the text. This kind of text structuring is found in J. Kross’s novel The Czar’s Madman, which (as well as some other historical novels by the same author, esp. Kolme katku vahel („Between Three Plagues”) and Professor Martensi ärasõit („Professor Martens’ Departure”)…

The article proceeds from the question „What were the members of the elite called in prehistoric Estonia?”. Since the early 20th century there have been attempts, mostly among our folklorists, to claim that they were called Kalevs, i.e. with the name of a legendary hero known from the later epics of Kalevipoeg and Kalevala. Though supporting this idea in general terms, the author of this paper argues that Kalevas a generic name for a representative of the elite was already born in the Late Bronze Age under the influence of Baltic languages. There have been numerous etymologies for the names Kalev(a) / Kalevine,…