Capturing the culture

There are rare moments when art changes a culture, and other moments when a book or film captures a cultural moment so that it acts like a mirror reflecting back where we are as a society.

Culture Watch James Paul

Douglas Coupland’s Generation X did that in the late 80s and early 90s for what he termed the ‘accelerated generation’ of young people whose lives were beginning to be dominated by a fast-emerging cyberculture. And some have recently made a similar claim in terms of the millennial generation for the novels of the 31-year-old Irish author Sally Rooney, the first of which, Conversations with Friends, has recently been turned into a BBC TV series.