Valtiomuutos ja satiirin pohjoinen ulottuvuus: Alueellinen ero ja kirjallisuuden politiikka Haanpään, Huovisen ja Heikkisen tuotannossa

• Main Author: Heikki Sirviö
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English; Finnish
• Published: The Geographical Society of Northern Finland 2015
• Subjects: Geography (General); G1-922; Heikkinen; Pekka; Northern Finland
• Online Access: https://doaj.org/article/731f1ef1e603404eabaf95591a392761

Since the 1980s, the Finnish state has been reshaped in significant ways, much like the transformation of statehood and state territoriality which has taken place all over the world. The economic, social, political and cultural forces working to reshape the state have undermined the legacy of the welfare state era and its “one nation” politics within Finland. To gain a better understanding of these transformative processes, my thesis focuses on the continuities and discontinuities in the dynamics of territorial and social integration/ disintegration of the Finnish state. My approach is through readings of satirical literature from the 1920s to the 2010s, where I focus on selected novels and short stories by three writers whom I believe are the best representatives of the northern dimension of satire in Finnish literature: Pentti Haanpää (1905–1955), Veikko Huovinen (1927–2009) and Mikko-Pekka Heikkinen (1974–). I use “the northern dimension of satire” as a heuristic device, which refers to the relative marginality of satire in Finnish literature, and to the shared cultural background of these prominent satirists, who all hailed from northern Finland. It can be understood as a centrifugal tradition rejecting the longstanding line of Finnish cultural policy and discourse on literature, which typically treats indigenousness as a problem while promoting a Finnish version of “genuine” European high culture. This satirical literature has often questioned these activities, as well as the politics of asserting cultural superiority from the core, the capital city of Helsinki in particular. It problematized the spatial and political structure of the state and the way in which its discursive practices define some places and scales as culturally valuable and reduce others to insignificance. My research design brings together materialistic and discursive perspectives on the political geography of state transformation. My analysis of state transformation is based on a materialist philosophy of history in which the spatial ...