Maintains that the culture of disintegrating marginal communities, such as the Franco-Ontarians and Acadians in Canada and the Gaelic-speaking communities of Ireland, serve the purpose of establishing 'an integral term of reference against which majority cultures construct identity.' Since the Quiet Revolution, Québecois culture has been formulated as much in response to the 'otherness' of peripheral French-Canadian communities in Manitoba, Ontario, and the Maritimes as it has to the larger societies of English Canada or the United States. Similarly, the marginal communities of Gaelic Ireland have contributed much to the construction of a larger Irish culture, although the act of writing in Gaelic automatically places those authors in 'a clearly defined and irreducible cultural community' that reaches far fewer people than do the writers of French Canada. Together, the quests for communal identity by Irish and non-Québecois French-Canadian poets and writers 'point to the process of fragmentation and displacement which conjures up personal and collective identity.' [S. R. Strom]