Limits to Capital? The Finnish Novel after the Neoliberal Turn

The lecture gives a brief introduction to capitalism as a thematic field in the contemporary Finnish novel, focusing on two examples that are interesting both in a literary sense and as thematicizations of the social construction of subjectivity: the novels of Arto Salminen and Kiltin yön lahjat (Good-Night Gifts, 1998) by Mari Mörö. These novels are read as literary reactions to a global and local context in which tension has grown between commodification and other modes of the social. While neo-liberalism asserts that merely one mode of relationality, the seller–buyer relation, is desirable, these texts remind us of the need for empathy, solidarity and other non-instrumental relations.

Jussi Ojajärvi is a Visiting Scholar in The Program in Literature at Duke University a fellow of the Academy of Finland.