The yearly drama of the incoming reading list at UNC-Chapel Hill. This year people are pissed that students are being asked to read Nickel and Dimed. I am just finishing this book and I, too, am pissed. Not because it is leftist or anti-capitalistic but because Barbara Ehrenreich is herself "clueless," there are points throughout the book when she is downright racist and classist. I say she may be clueless because she seems to be trying to lighten the depressing situation of the working class poor. The only problem is that her jokes are often at the expense of the poor and often colored (as in people of color, not as in African American) folk.
I am also disturbed that Ehrenreich's idea of submersive, investigative journalism includes allowing herself the luxury of going to the doctor and buying medication for a rash when her co-workers work on broken appendages because they have no medical insurance. She plops down huge security deposits for apartments while the WCP folk around her sleep in cars or seedy motels while trying to save up for a security deposit. I won't go on and on because I don't want to spoil it for you, but one of my biggest problems with Nickel and Dimed was the fact that when the going gets tough Ehrenreich gets going (literally). She has the luxury of walking away from a bad situation when she chooses.
A Case *for* assigning _Nickel and Dimed_
Last year, I assigned Nickel and Dimed to my first-year comp students--that was one class in the fall and two in the spring. Fraught as it is, it does make students think. I had my students do rhetorical analyses of it--in the form of discussions in class, not written analyses. We talked about thesis statement, the evidence Ehrenreich uses to support her argument (mostly stories about her coworkers and labor statistics in the footnotes), and ETHOS. Nickel and Dimed is a stunning lesson in what not to do to build ethos. Students loved criticizing her actions--they said exactly what you said, Samantha, about Ehrenreich's "allowing herself the luxury of going to the doctor and buying medication for a rash when her co-workers work on broken appendages because they have no medical insurance," etc. Students were very confident in analyzing the ethos of rhetors after reading that book. They would come to my office or talk to me before or after class about the book, too. I would usually assign half a chapter per class meeting (one chapter a week--the chapters are pretty long) and many of the students would read ahead because they just couldn't put it down. The book made them angry, but they were completely engaged. We also looked at audience response to the book, both their own and the letters, and I encouraged them to write their own letters to Ehrenreich and turn them in as response papers (and send them to Ehrenreich too!).
I'm not using the book anymore in FYC, mostly because I taught it for a year and I don't want to get bored with it. Also, I'd like to assign a newer book. At any rate, I am a big believer in assigning a book-length argument in FYC.
CultureCat
Argument and Ethos
I think Clancy makes some excellent points about how *not* to build ethos. At the same time, I might point out that Ehrenreich's actions -- going to the doctor, putting down a security deposit -- serve, in fact, to *underscore* the book's primary argument: you can't survive on minimum wage in America. That's not a perspective that gets heard much these days.
That said, it still doesn't address BE's obnoxiousness. I'm of two minds here: one, students may find the ethos so obnoxious that they discount the entire argument, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. Two, students may find it a valuable lesson that they can very much disagree with certain things a writer says and still find that such disagreement need not invalidate *everything* a writer says. Which I think is an essential lesson to learn in understanding how ethos and argument work, and in building communities of understanding where people can disagree on some issues but not engage in wholesale rejection of those with whom they disagree.
Disclaimer: I agree very much with BE's basic argument, that you can't get by on minimum wage (and its corollary, that the American Dream is a miserable smokescreen for a lot of people), so my ideological position makes me more willing than others may be to cut her some slack.
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Mike Edwards
www.vitia.org
As someone who worked two job
As someone who worked two jobs waiting tables during college I can definitely agree with BE's claims that you can't live on minimum wage. But that doesn't stop me from seeing the flaws in the book, especially some of the racially charged jokes that she makes about black customers calling the NAACP and her moving on to Maine because it was a place where white people would be nice to other white people. I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and say that she was making an attempt at humor, but I still say it's NOT funny.