Notes from the Suburb: the Image of Helsinki in the works by Kjell Westö

My doctoral thesis aims at analysing the suburbs of Helsinki as the urban space where the social, economic, cultural and linguistic transformations of the Finnish post-war society took place. Starting with the neo-marxist discourse elaborated by Marshall Berman in his essay "All that is solid melts into air", and taking into account contributions from the neo-marxist school, such as Pierre Bourdieau's, Terry Eagleton's and Rickard Graneau's, my thesis explores a selection of the works by the Finnish-Swedish writer Kjell Westö (1961), where the transformations of Helsinki during the second half of the century seem to reflect the country's opening to post-war capitalism. After a survey about Finnish modern history,my study focuses on the linguistic contraposition between the Finnish-speaking majority and the the Swedish-speaking minority as it has evolved during the Nineteenth and Twentieth century, trying to re-consider the concept of official language as a reliable means to help different communities to live side by side in the same space.