How victims of globalisation have been presented in poems, novels and films.

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In the late 20th century some people could be regarded or see themselves as victims of globalisation.

Critically evaluate the way composers have represented these people to show how globalisation has created ways of thinking that have affected them.

Globalisation has seen the erosion of traditional boundaries, in order for technology to expand the communication of universal truths, collapsing time and distance, and homogenise global and local constructions of reality into a single cultural identity. This “culture of cultures,” however, maintains values which perpetuate negative impacts upon the local, victimising one’s cultural environment and identity on various levels as can be seen in Seamus Heaney’s poems – “Digging” and “Requiem for the Croppies,” and Annie Proulx’s novel- “The Shipping News.” These texts along with others including Yasumara Morimara’s visual “The Slaughter Cabinet II,” the film “Snow Falling on Cedar,” and the Television series – “Star Trek: Voyager;” use various techniques and paradigms to illustrate how retreating becomes a way of challenging the status quo, through preserving the local. These texts illustrate the way globalisation has created different ways of thinking, which have often emphasised the way one struggles to exclude the global, or balance both cultural forces.

These different ways of thinking have often come to existence, as a result of individuals who become aware of the disintegration of the qualities which make their local traditional and enlightening. In Heaney’s “Digging,” the composer’s use of structural divisions symbolically supports the process of retreating, exploring his Irish heritage. The exclamation of “by god” and abstract notion of the “old man”, for instance, conveys a sense of admiration for the traditional connections between the Irish and their land – “By god, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man.” The political discourse, however, created by the pen’s quality of being “snug as a gun;” and the irony where the pen or the Global is needed to communicate local values; indicates that the composer has accepted that the victimisation of the local is inevitable and inescapable. These Global forces, however, has led Heaney to suggest to the responder that although the past cannot be replaced, and a total complete return can be made, there is an alternate way to “dig” and “follow men like them,” using strategies of the global against itself – “The squat pen rests, ill dig with it.”

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Globalisation has superseded national boundaries, influencing one’s interpretations of their lives to a degree in which they are forced to respond through conforming to standards, revolting or suffering as victims unable to find an identity or community to belong to. Similar to “Digging,” the use of structural divisions in “The Shipping News,” significantly symbolises Quoyle’s retreat, and reveals to the responder the vast contrasts between global and local values. Quoyle’s childhood, for instance, imaginatively describes the global as superficial and unaccommodating – “failure of a normal appearance…at sixteen he was buried under a casement of flesh…” All one can do in ...

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