Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street Literary Elements

Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street Literary Elements

Genre

Non-fiction and Ethics

Setting and Context

The 2000s, post-The Great Recession epoch

Narrator and Point of View

Jim Wallis employs both third-person and first-person voices (us, we) throughout the text.

Tone and Mood

Ethical, moralist, thoughtful, religious, rousing, philosophical

Protagonist and Antagonist

“We” are the protagonists. Idolatry and lacking ethics the economy are the non-human antagonists.

Major Conflict

Erosion of morality in the contemporary business world has resulted in social-economic crises.

Climax

Wallis’ proposed climax: Society-wide moral recovery that would positively alter the economy.

Foreshadowing

N/A

Understatement

Wallis observes that capitalist businesses today have underestimated the significance of social entrepreneurship because their holy grail is profits.

Allusions

Wallis alludes to Gandhi's philosophy, the Bible, economics, and historical occurrences such as the Holocaust.

Imagery

The imagery of the "2008-2009 economic crisis" is central to the author's key argument concerning the role of morality in the economy.
Unethical practices are rampant in the market today.

Paradox

The media, through appealing advertisements, encourages vices such as greed that fuel consumerism through covert, paradoxical messages such as "Greed is good." Yet, the media would be expected to denounce and discourage such vices.

Parallelism

N/A

Metonymy and Synecdoche

"Wall Street" denotes the corporate world and the big companies that run it. The "invisible hand" represents market dynamics beyond the market players' swaying.

Personification

The market is personified. “Bad apples” have been personified to represent bad leadership.

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