Seguin and Toil of the Laborer

The SIS II blog would not let me contribute a new post; I have commented on one of Jude's postings and I will post on here aswell.

The review of Around Quitting Time I have found is from http://www.amazon.com/Around-Quitting-Time-Middle-Class-Americanists/dp/0822326701. This site gives two reviews from academics, and is aimed at people who are possibly contemplating buying the book.

Seguin aims to look at the notion of Middle-classness in the united states, and juxtaposes this with the notion that America is a classless society; on page 2 he argues "the term "middle class" itself in effect becomes synoymous with "classlessness", an ideologico-practical inhabitance of the world wherein class has been putatively superseded, or at least temporarily suspended".

Seguin aims to outline that although America views itself as a largely classless society, most Americans describle themselves as middle-class, therefore showing how America is imagined as an ideological utopia by its residents.

The extract of Dreiser's Toil Of the Laborer counters this, showing how the working man is exploited, overworked and underpaid. He describes from his own experiences how manual labour is hard and boring and meagerly rewarded; the worker, he says, is treated like a machine and pushed to his physical limits. He also shows from the perspective of a foreman how the hierarchy is so powerful; although he wishes to ease the lives of the laborers in his promoted role, there are many constraints from above, showing how the world of work involves taking orders from superiors, and in Drieser's experience, is unfulfilling.