Barabara Ehrenreich, the bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed, came out with another book published in 2005 dealing with all the white-collared people, the middle working class, who do everything right: going to college, getting their resume, not getting pregnant before hand, abiding by all the rules and regulations, having had professional experience, and still cannot seem to get a steady job. The novel is entitled, Bait and Switch: The (futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. This novel is a based of from the first book but this time instead of going undercover as a poor person who has to work 3 jobs just to make a decent, steady living, she goes undercover as a "regular white-collared" person and tries to find a decent, steady job in order to make a living. Along the way she's trying to find the fruads and faults that are committed and doing everything of trying to find a job like everybody else. She did online applications to however many she could, and even got help from career coaches. These are suppose to be the people who are on top of the whole job searching business, and know exactly what businesses are looking for and how they can get their clients satisfied, and a nice steady, decent job without much of a hassle. So Ms. Ehrenreich takes us along her undcover journey as she finds how hard the white-collared people actually have it no matter what they did to prepare themselves up until this point.
Tone: cautious, determined, curious
Writing Style: learned
Rhetorical Strategies:
1. Allusion- "and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces." (Page 53 last sentence in paragraph).
2. Emotional Appeal- "who according to the coaching web...hold your hand at every step along the way." (pages 15-16 end of page).
Application Question:
Has the time from which Ms. Ehrenreich and now of how the white-collared society conditions in working have changed, or are they getting better or worse?
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1 comment:
That's a good summary of the book. It's very interesting how Barbara Ehrenreich enjoys going undercover for writing of her books. I also find some of her experiences on the search for jobs, to be very appealing. For example, Ehrenreich goes to an interview where she and her personality are compared to the personality of an Elvis doll, and the interviewer begins to miss the point of the interview itself. I think it is very interesting how each day, people in the middle class searching for a job, go through experiences such as that.
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