Instructions
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 “The Unbearable Straightness of Violence: Queering Serial Murder in True Crime,” p. 209 in Natural Born Celebrities.
Keep in mind, as you read, 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 (Natural Born Celebrities)
Choose one questions:
- On p. 209, Schmid argues that one of the ways we can stop audiences from identifying with serial killers is to use their abused or abnormal childhood to separate them from our own experiences. How does this work in The Talented Mr. Ripley? Relate the material in Schmid’s chapter to the film/novel we viewed in this unit?
- On p. 221, Schmid suggests that most novels/films portray the killers as sexual deviants, but they do so in a way that implies that serial killers are somehow “not normal” in their appetites. This quickly leads to questions of homosexuality or bisexuality as easy targets. If the killers are heterosexual, their sexuality is never mentioned. How does this argument play out in The Talented Mr. Ripley?
- Throughout this complex chapter, Schmid argues that often the murderers portray a fear or hatred of women as motive for their killing. How does Ripley alter or complicate Schmid’s argument?
