Modernities in Literature
Jul. 22nd, 2003 07:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldYesterday afternoon, when reading the newspaper articles written by Louis Hémon for various Canadian and French papers in the 1911-1913 period, I was struck by Hémon's observation that just because French Canada had diverged from France under British influence did not mean that French Canada hadn't avoided assimilation. He talked about different models of modernity.
This dovetailed interestingly with Pattern Recognition, where Cayce Pollard--an American, a "cool-hunter" whose career is based on the evaluation of corporate logos and images through her hypersensitivity to commercial products--talks about "mirror worlds." In these places--Britain, Japan--industrialization occurred separately from the United States and accordingly produced slightly deviant standards, producing a basic skewing of things. She feared that in the end, a general homogeneity would pervade the world thanks to the efforts of multinational moguls; but she might yet be wrong, if only because culture and tastes will likely remain distinct so long as there are distinct world cultures.
This dovetailed interestingly with Pattern Recognition, where Cayce Pollard--an American, a "cool-hunter" whose career is based on the evaluation of corporate logos and images through her hypersensitivity to commercial products--talks about "mirror worlds." In these places--Britain, Japan--industrialization occurred separately from the United States and accordingly produced slightly deviant standards, producing a basic skewing of things. She feared that in the end, a general homogeneity would pervade the world thanks to the efforts of multinational moguls; but she might yet be wrong, if only because culture and tastes will likely remain distinct so long as there are distinct world cultures.
