Abstract

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.