Please choose one of the following questions to answer for this unit by Wednesday at 11:59pm (CST). You should also respond to two of your classmates’ postings by Sunday at 11:59pm (CST).
Before answering this unit’s questions, you should read “Serial Killing in America After 9/11,” p. 244 in Natural Born Celebrities.
Keep in mind, as you view the film, a few of the questions posted below.
Directions
Full-bodied entries—of at least ten sentences of writing from you (in addition to quotations from the text)—are more likely to receive full credit. Lesser credit will be assigned to work that is missing, brief, or clearly disengaged or sloppily produced such that miscues interfere with readability.
Your responses to other students’ work are also assessed. Students often resist commenting on each others’ work in substantial ways; instead choosing to post simply “good job” or “looks okay to me.” This kind of peer response doesn’t help your own—or your peers’—development as a writer and thinker.
Acceptable peer responses will, among other things:
- Explicitly identify what was learned from someone else’s work.
- Ask a follow-up question.
- Offer an alternative interpretation.
- Offer concrete strategies for improvement.
Questions (Reading and General Questions)
Choose one questions to answer:
- In the final chapter from Natural Born Celebrities, Schmid argues that the serial killer genre and the terrorist genre of films coincided after 9/11. The co-mingling of the genres offered an opportunity for us to associate serial killers as a foreign threat to our nation. What ties do you see between this idea and the zombie trend in popular culture right now?
- Overall, what concepts about violence in the media have you gained during the time in this course? What ideas will resonate with you after the course ends? While most people simply consume these films and TV series as mindless entertainment, what do you now think they are actually watching and internalizing, if anything?
- If you were teaching this course, what media would you have included in the syllabus? (Remember, the idea: How are we valorizing the serial killer or reversing the positions of killers within pop culture.) Thoughts?
