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Against the backdrop of the tension between objectivity and multiplicity in journalism and rhetorical studies, this paper attempts to revisit Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed (2001). In her book, Ehrenreich represents her undercover journalistic experiment that investigates whether she can(not) get by as an unskilled, low-wage worker. I first examine how the myth of journalistic objectivity has been socially constructed in twentieth-century America and how the genre of identity immersion journalism is dedicated to debunking the myth. Challenging Gebhardt’s critique of Ehrenreich’s book for not fitting into the genre characteristics of identity immersion journalism, I seek to redefine it as the book’s strength rather than its limitation. To support this, I explore how Ehrenreich uses rhetorical and representational devices for generating multiplicity and shifting narrative distances between the author, the reader, and characters in order to provoke her readers’ empathy, guilt, and shame rather than journalistic conventions of objectivity, unity, and professionalism.
