Unit 3: Discussion – Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Dexter Discussion (Reading)
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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 “Idols of Destruction: Celebrity, Consumerism and the Serial Killer,” p. 1 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 (Reading)
Choose one questions to answer:
- Schmid asks why the murderabilia industry has begun to sell the personal effects of real serial killers as if they were religious icons. What is Schmid’s argument, and what is your own theory? Why would we want to own a part of murder history? How does this relate to the merchandise being sold surrounding Dexter?
- Schmid discusses the differences between “good” fame and “bad” fame on p. 12 of this chapter. How does this definition apply to Dexter and our strange admiration for his public service?
- “Representations of death, especially aesthetic representations, are able to assuage such anxieties because ‘they occur in a realm clearly delineated as not life, or not real’ . . . we experience death by proxy” (Schmid 17). In the lecture in this unit, we discussed the TV series’ ability to show, but also not show the violence that Dexter was committing. Using examples from the text or the series, show us your own perspective. Do we want to see this violence or not?
