unit 3 discussion 17
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 view at least the first two episodes of Dexter and read Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay.
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 (Novel and TV)
Choose one question to answer:
- If Dexter Morgan is a vigilante, does that make him an acceptable or heroic serial killer? Is he completing a community service for the public? Use specific examples from the novel to highlight the way that Jeff Lindsay writes his novel as a way of exposing the flaws in our communities or justice system.
- Compare Dexter the series to another crime procedural drama on television today. How does Dexter operate in ways that challenge accepted notions of violence in ways that other series’ do not? Be specific in your examples from the series. (To answer this question, please check to make sure your drama is currently on television. Keep it current.)
- What exactly are the differences you noted between the TV series and the novel? Why do you suppose these differences exist–and how do they help us understand Dexter in different ways. Essentially, the novel and series will separate at a particular point–why?
