Essay 2: Consumption of violence

Before answering this unit’s questions, you should read Schmid’s Natural Born Celebrities, ”The Victorian Killer as Media Star: Jack the Ripper and H.H. Holmes, p. 31.Four to five sentences for each question, please.

1. At first glance, there is little to connect Joe Goldberg (in our novel this week) and Jack the Ripper. Still, Schmid portrays the panic and fascination with the Ripper as something that the media created. On p. 33, Schmid describes the public panic in 1888 when Jack the Ripper stalked and killed his victims as motivated by the media. Is our fascination with serial killers dramatically different in the 21st century? Give specific media examples or points from our novel this week to detail why or why not.

2. Much of Schmid’s chapter discusses the ties between Jack the Ripper and nationality, specifically his ”Englishness” or his foreignness, depending upon the choice of suspects. What aspects of our society or national identity appear to be tied with serial killer media in the 21st century or with the consumption of violence overall?

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.