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Assignment 5b – nonfiction
- Summary of “Hillbilly Elegy. A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis”
- Analysis of “Hillbilly Elegy. A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis”
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Uddrag
According to Yale-graduate J.D Vance in the introduction to his book, “Hillbilly Elegy. A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” (2016), modern American culture increasingly encourages social decay.
He argues that the social decay is less of a result of the economic structures, racism and possibilities in the American workforce but rather a result of e.g., isolation and lack of work-ethic, as he himself – coming from that background – with help and support broke the pattern of poverty.
He also mentions that Hillbillies for decades has had poverty and hard work as a family tradition. As per Vance the culture incentivizes reacting badly to bad circumstances so the economic insecurity millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent experience becomes partly self-inflicted
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Even though he is academically educated, his writing style in the introduction is simple with a plethora of anecdotes and comments that ooze with pathos and strengthen his ethos.
Firstly, he uses a lot of personal pronouns; his way to create pathos and a relationship between him and the reader. Secondly, there are parenthetical phrases that strengthen or weaken the adjective he uses.
For example, “I have, to put it mildly, a complex relationship with my parents”, the parenthetical phrase intensifies, the adjective “complex” in the resuming sentence.
Moreover, he uses unacademic words like, bullshit and ludicrous, which makes the reader see him as one of them.
This writing style and these simple sentence structures also reveal the people whom he is addressing; not people with the same experiences, but rather those who have not endured the issues he presents.
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