To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

Critical theorists, I need your help! I've got this half-finished introductory paragraph to my last chapter, and I can tell I need to namecheck someone, but I can't think of who it is. Someone out there has written on modernity/progress vs. tradition/stagnation and the dialectic of the break and whatnot, but I can't think of who it might be. I'm sure we'll cover it in my Modernism seminar this semester, but I kind of need to have this chapter finished by the fourth, so I turn to you.

If it helps, the paragraph is as follows (please to be keeping in mind it's a very rough draft):

In "Dumbness and Eloquence: A Note on English As We Write It in Ireland," Seamus Deane writes, "English is not merely the language of a country or an empire or of an invading culture; it is the language of a condition—modernity" (113). Deane contends that modernity and British imperialism are inextricably linked in post-Famine Ireland, with the "catastrophic dimension" of mass starvation combining with "all the other forces of industralization, urbanization and educational policy" (112) to spur a rejection of the Irish language and associated culture in favor of English, to which progress was linked. English was the language through which the improvements and changes of the Industrial Revolution and of modern life were delivered from the eighteenth century onward; it was the language of urbanization, centered in Dublin and reaching out to the rest of the country. By the nineteenth century, Irish was spoken primarily in rural areas, and the Famine, which took the greatest toll on rural residents, both accelerated the decline of the language (from over three million speakers in 1845 to fewer than two million in 1851 (Ó Gráda 67)) and further linked it with the poor, backwards, and helpless in the popular imagination.

Possibly I also need to reference someone on urbanization? I was thinking of Anderson, but I had to return the copy of Imagined Communities I checked out, and my notes don't indicate that he covers quite what I feel is missing. I'm not recalling Jameson as being helpful either, but maybe...? Argh, so frustrating. I know there's stuff out there on this, but I don't even know where to start looking.