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How Should We Teach The Jungle Rhetorical Analysis

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“How Should We Teach The Jungle” by Christopher Phelps has a more convincing argument than “Of Meat and Myth” by Lawrence W. Reed. It is incontrovertible that Phelps believes The Jungle should be taught. Phelps not only includes his ideas, but he also includes others’ ideas to support his own. This way, his argument is supported by more than just facts, unlike Reed’s argument. In “How Should We Teach The Jungle”, Phelps uses evidence, reasoning, and style to show that The Jungle is important in shaping the intellectual development of the youth. To begin, evidence is used to strengthen Phelps’ argument that The Jungle can shape the intellectual development of the youth. For example, the portrayal of African-Americans is a strong part of Phelps’ …show more content…

He states, “The demise of the Rudkus family, she[Louise Carroll Wade] argues, is far-fetched , given the statistically improbable series of disasters that befall it within a few years’ time” (3). Wade, a social historian, uses reasoning to support her idea that all these events that happen to the Rudkus family are highly unlikely. This makes the reader skeptical about the reality of this book and have sympathy for the Rudkus family. Phelps uses Wade’s point to further express the reasoning behind the Rudkus family’s misfortunes, “we consider Jurgis a literary personification of the whole immigrant working class” (3). This relates to the previous quote saying how all these horrible and unfortunate events happen only to the Rudkus family because they represent all the working class families and the difficulties they faced. Jurgis is sanguine in the beginning of the book when he first arrives, but becomes extremely lugubrious after he loses almost his entire family indirectly to capitalism. These reasons help fortify Phelps’ argument because they help the reader “acquire a higher level of analytical skill” (Phelps 4) to be able to understand why all these events happen to just one …show more content…

Phelps suggests, “First, students love it... even undergraduates who consider history “boring” respond to The Jungle” (2). The incredible detail of the events that occurs at the meatpacking industry that Sinclair uses in this novel has made even uninterested students interested. Sinclair criticizes the unfairness of capitalism as well. Phelps comments, “The objective was to break the unions, drive down wages, and speed up processing” (2). The purpose of capitalism was to allow the upper class to remain in power, such as Connor and Scully, while restricting the working class, such as Jurgis and Ona, from obtaining enough money to support their families. Phelps uses negative words such as “racist” and “vulnerable” to inculcate the hardships immigrants had suffered which leads to shaping the intellectual development of the youth because this way the reader can have a glimpse of what it was like to be an immigrant at that

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863 Words | 4 Pages

Subject: The Jungle mainly focuses on poor living conditions for the working class in 20th century Chicago. I learned how corrupt politics in this time period were, how gross the meatpacking industry used to be, and how hard immigrants had it when they came to America. This text is controversial because it gives suggestion that socialism is the better government system. This would split the sides into those for capitalism and those for socialism. Occasion: The Jungle was written in 1906 by Upton Sinclair.

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1261 Words | 6 Pages

In “ The Jungle”, the author Upton Sinclair states that “ I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach”. This means that Sinclair wanted to muckrake the Meat Packing Industry to seek attention for the workers, but instead food became a bigger concern. The characters Jurgis, Ona, and Marija with fellow family members are Lithuanian immigrants who came to PackingTown in hope for a better future, however they came to realize that the whole town is run by capitalist. Although Sinclair intentionally uses metaphors and similes to depict the characters struggle in the horrible living and working conditions in Packingtown, his purpose is undermined and overlooked by his use of realism to depict the food process.

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1326 Words | 6 Pages

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is an American novel classic. This book provides a lens into the life of 20th century immigrants working in poor conditions throughout industrialization. Sinclair set out to expose the harsh conditions that these poor immigrants had to live in. By doing so, he wanted to show that not only was the meatpacking industry vile, but also wanted to show that capitalism doesn’t work.

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185 Words | 1 Pages

Upton Sinclair displays his dexterous writing ability in one of his most widely familiar books “The Jungle”. Throughout this unique masterpiece Sinclair broadcast multiple conditions which one today would not know to judge from its content as a horror or jest. He goes about this by storytelling the life of an immigrant family. These conditions vary from poor living setups to the stomach turning health violations undertook by the meat industry. Overall imposing his theory that the heavily sold illusion of the american dream wasn’t at all what it was made out to be.

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1060 Words | 5 Pages

Thus, Sinclair’s purpose of writing The Jungle failed to bring readers to advocate for the rights of workers trapped in the low wages, unsafe working conditions, and long hours of meatpacking factories, but rather, succeeded in opening the country’s eyes to the meatpacking practices that went on behind closed doors and the establishment administrations to protect the public from these unscrupulous

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2031 Words | 9 Pages

Those writers and journalists were called “Muckrakers”, Upton Sinclair was one of them. In order to stay on his position and support the muckrakers, he chose to tell the truth to American public instead of keeping silence. Then, “The Jungle” became his weapon to oppose the trusts and some corrupt officials. Although the content is dangerous and risky, it’s also effective and worth. People responded dramatically to this book, the risk has valuation for Upton Sinclair to take and hook the

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1899 Words | 8 Pages

There are many other traps around America that deceive the immigrants because their weakness of not knowing English and the desire of getting a great life in America which lead them unpreparedly get fooled by the businessmen. These traps prevented the immigrants from leaving America, because of the significant amount of debt that they have to pay each month, which forced them to keep working and become the slave of this capitalistic society in America. Unfortunately, even they work very hard, in most of the time they will not get anything in return, such that Jurgis’s family cannot even keep the house at the of the book and many of family members’ health destroyed by the harsh working conditions in the

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707 Words | 3 Pages

The Jungle, written by Upton Sinclair, is best known as a fiction story. It talks about how immigrants were treated cruelly, in a packing town somewhere in Chicago. Which is where he asked most of his questions, as a journalist. One of the questions applied to how the social class affects their structure at work. An immigrant, low social class background for a character named Jurgis demonstrates how inequitable life can be in the early 1900s.

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1384 Words | 6 Pages

Sinclair explains how capitalism turned people greedy and to use each other for their own benefits. For example, “Here was Durham's, for instance, owned by a man who was trying to make as much money out of it as he could, and did not care in the least how he did it; and underneath him, ranged in ranks and grades like an army, were managers and superintendents and foremen, each one driving the man next below him and trying to squeeze out of him as much work as possible.” Sinclair says nothing good about capitalism and continues to be against it by showing examples of how capitalists were not only corrupt but unsympathetic to American values of family, morals, democracy, and community. This sets up an open window for socialism. Sinclair truly believed that Socialism was something that could prevent the continuation of capitalism and wrote this book to promote it.

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634 Words | 3 Pages

The Bosses squeezed and drained the life of those men. In the book The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair he described the life of a struggling family try to work and stay alive in the filth. The working conditions in the factories were unsafe, unsanitary and people made little. The purpose of this book was for people to become socialist other than capitalist.

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265 Words | 2 Pages

A perfect economic system is every nation’s dream. While no system can achieve this expectation, some have more flaws than others. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story all strive to display to its readers and viewers the destruction Capitalism creates within a society. In The Jungle, Sinclair tells the story of the struggles a family of the working class undergoes due to the horrible working conditions in Packingtown, Chicago.

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1649 Words | 7 Pages

In Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle”, the pressures of success and the flaws of capitalism causes the general society to devalue the human qualities as the repetitive labor transforms the employees into mere disposable parts of a machinery. The workers are evidently reduced by their circumstances, which they have no other choice as a result of overwhelming forces of capitalism. For example, “the time limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years.” (Sinclair) This depicts how just like the animals who are slaughtered daily at the plantations, the employees were being slaughtered ruthlessly and were grinded down by the system of capitalism, as if they were expendable resource.

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1246 Words | 5 Pages

The labeling of the novel as racist is both a misunderstanding and deviation from the truth. The academic field is the most vocal in the quest to ban the book and save children from perceived moral deterioration. This hurdle is overcome by the fact that the book is only meant for adults. Furthermore, the proposition of inappropriateness of words such as nigger and Injun as used in the book is not enough to discredit the positives of the book and are therefore insignificant. Therefore, I propose on readers to focus on the greater good of the book and bypass the insignificant orientation of the language by aligning with the fact that the language is a construct of the 19th century Missouri

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1028 Words | 5 Pages

By the age of fifteen, he had known an uncle lynched for being “too” successful and knew of a black youth murdered for forgetting the strict sexual taboos surrounding interchanges between black men and white women. He had been personally assaulted without provocation by white youths and had participated in street battles between white and black adolescents. His insistent pursuit of a way out of the South is thus a reaction to the physical terrorism exercised against the black community. It is also a repudiation of the psychological condition that racism fosters in its victims. Richard has already suffered for years from the debilitating anxiety caused by trying to predict the behavior of white people, and he has often felt the impact of their displeasure, repeatedly losing jobs when they resent his manner or ambition.

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1202 Words | 5 Pages

During the time period of the 1900’s, the meat packaging industry in Chicago, as Sinclair mentions in his novel, The Jungle, was a very unsanitary and extremely dangerous workplace that lacked much more than just a few safety precautions. Simple things, such as enforcing hand washing or workers’ rights were unheard of in the working environment. It is clear that Upton Sinclair was trying to expose the worker’s horrendous labor conditions in order to improve their situation, along with the introduction of socialism. Upton Sinclair, in his novel, talks about how a Lithuanian immigrant by the name of Jurgis Rudkus, and his family, travel to Chicago trying to make ends meet. However, they soon realize Chicago was not the place for that.

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