Thatcher 1

Christopher Thatcher

Professor Mooney

ENC 1102

5 March 2020

Literature Review

Downs describes rhetoric like gravity, in the sense that gravity is a set of principles that

explains and tries to predict how different types of matter interact with each other. Rhetoric is a

set of principles that describe and explain a lot about human communication, interaction, and

their experiences. Similarly, James Paul Gee defines discourse as “connected stretches of

language that discourse communities use every day to communicate with each other” (Gee 274).

The media uses these two essential concepts when producing stories to audiences about serial

killers and the way they portray them. I have always had a fascination with serial killers because

they are truly polarizing figures who have been portrayed in many different ways. The media has

either portrayed them as true monsters or characters of mystery in feature films and novels like

The Silence of the Lambs and American Psycho. Research has even been done talking about the

new rhetoric and scholarship of the new media such as movies and the creation of the internet

with online publications of journals and books. Some researchers have dug into how serial killers

commit their actions and how just their presence can create an environment of fear and terror

which causes many psychological issues for people.

Bartels explains the aesthetics of how serial killers commit their weekly serial hunts for

victims. He also talks about how important it is to be educated about these weekly serial hunts in

order to trace their criminal history and the overall history of criminals. The main takeaway is

how the aesthetics of the perfect murder is a sublime of beauty to these serial killers, and that
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most serial killers suffer from semiotic deformity. O’Connell and Grunder explore how a serial

killer creates an environment of fear and terror. Exploring how students left in the murder zone

of a serial killer suffered terrible emotinal and mental stress that it caused their academics to slip.

Cassuto also mentions the lore of serial killers. He notes that serial killers suffer from many

psychological disorders, causing them to turn into monsters that scare everyone. Cassuto’s article

doubles up with another major theme of my research, how serial killers are portrayed in novels

and films.

Cassuto explores how serial killers are portrayed in fictional circumstances. Looking at

some of the most famous fictional serial killers such as Hannibal Lector, he explains how they

are portrayed and what makes them so intriguing to read about. He notes that real life serial

killers also differ from real life serial killers, how they target different people and their ways of

killing those victims. Similarly, Allué’s article takes note of Lector and another famous serial

killer in fiction in Patrick Bateman. Talking about the stories of The Silence of the Lambs and

American Psycho, she talks about the differences of how serial killers can be portrayed. Stories

like Silence of the Lambs are stories that glamorise the killer. They are the main attraction of the

story, the characters readers focus on the most. Other stories like American Psycho portray the

killers as characters with no sources of aesthetic pleasure. Gibson talks about a feature french

film that portrays the serial killer as something completely different from Cassuto and Allué. He

mentions that the serial killer’s compulsion and repetition of the way he kills his victims fits the

mold of what the mainstream capitalist society looks for when watching movies about serial

killers. Film adaptations of serial killers talk about the final theme of my intended research, the

scholarship and rhetoric of the new media.

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Cheryl E. Ball’s article explores the evolving world of the media with the creation of the

internet and the creation of digital rhetoric. She talks about how the new media uses audio and

videos along with written text to make new meaning. She notes that research has not really been

done on the rhetoric and scholarship of these online publications and tries to figure out what they

are and how they work. “This text demonstrates how multimodal elements and new media

strategies such as the enactment of the text through a timeline can help readers interpret

meanings made through modes that move beyond linear, print traditions.” (Bell 421).

With all the research done on how the media portrays serial killers in a fictional manner,

there is really a lack of research done on how the media portrays real life serial killers like Ted

Bundy, Jeffery Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy. Providing research into that gap will help me

fully answer the question of how the media portrays serial killers. Noting that serial killers are

dangerous people, it is important to know how dangerous they are by reading how they are

portrayed in real life, not just the fictional world for our reading pleasure.

Annotated Bibliography

Works Cited

Bartels, Klaus. “Serial Killers: Sublimity to Be Continued. Aesthetics and Criminal

History.” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 43, no. 3, 1998, pp. 497–516. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/41157401. Accessed 1 Mar. 2020. The main idea of this article talks

about the aesthetics of how serial killers perform their murders, and how important it is to

learn about their actions to trace their criminal history and the history of criminals in

general. Bartels explains how the term serial killer was coined and their motivations to

commit such horrible acts. The article does a textual analysis of a hypothesis of the
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aesthetics of the sublime brought forth by Burke, Kant, and De Quincey to test the

relevance of it as it pertains to serial killers. Talking about the theories of De Quincey,

Kant, and Burke, Bartels is able to connect the actions of serial killers into the hypothesis

that the aesthetic of the perfect murder is the sublime of beauty to these serial killers.

Bartels’s analysis makes clear that the motivations of serial killers is partially due to

semiotic deformity.

This article might not talk about the media portrayal of serial killers, but it

does bring light to the subject of what serial killers are and how they act. It is related to

some of my other secondary sources that talks about what serial killers do and what their

motivations are, and is related to the overarching theme of serial killers. It is closely

related to another source in my annotated bibliography by Cassuto. They both talk about

how serial killers are monsters and suffer from some kind of mental illness. They both

also explore how serial killers perform their actions on weekly serial hunts looking for

victims. While this source might go against my ultimate research question and focus on

how the media portrays serial killers, it will be reliable in providing essential background

information of serial killers.

O’Connell, April, and Patricia Grunder. “The Emotional, Physical, and Academic Impact of

Living with Terror.” Community College Journal, vol. 74, no. 1, Jan. 2003, pp. 24–29.

EBSCOhost. This article has the main idea of how the presence of a serial killer near a

college can create an environment of fear and terror which can cause the academics of

students to suffer. O’Connell and Grunder explain how just the threat of a serial killer can

negatively impact a community and cause them to live in constant fear. More

importantly, how a serial killer threatens a college campus can have serious implications
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on students and families of those students. The article conducts a pretty serious case

study with some of the students who had to leave the area while police investigated the

threat. O’Connell and Grunder wanted to focus on three essential questions while

interviewing the students who had returned to campus after the investigation was

complete. They focused on the emotional and physical consequences the students had

endured during the entire situation, and how their experiences had an impact on their

college studies. The results were pretty shocking. Talking about the emotional and

physical consequences the students suffered, the female students were much more open

to speaking about what they had suffered from. That included feeling nausea, dizziness,

and faintness. The male students were much more closed about the effects the situation

had on them. That all changed when they found out one of the victims killed by the serial

killer happened to be male. Some effects that were reported by the students included lost

focus of their studies and sleeping problems. The men reported having feelings of anger

and rage, while the women reported feelings of sadness. Talking about the impact on

their college studies, O’Connell and Grunder found that students who stayed in the muder

zone and experienced this traumatic event had an overall grade point average that was

four tenths of a grade lower than the students who decided to commute away from the

muder zone. A cause of this was lower concentration in class due to heightened anxiety.

Serial killers are dangerous people who can create these environments of terror causing

massive stress among everyone.

This article is one of my secondary sources that does not necessarily relate

to my other secondary sources. It does mention the recurring theme of serial killers but

that is the only way it relates to my other secondary sources. The main takeaway from
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this article is how serial killers can create an environment of fear when still on the loose. I

can use this article when talking about what impact a serial killer has on people that

aren’t victims, and how dangerous serial killers can really be. It helps provide perspective

on how people truly fear these killers and how their lives are impacted when learning a

serial killer is on the loose in their area.

Cassuto, Leonard. “The Cultural Work of Serial Killers.” Minnesota Review: A Journal

of Creative and Critical Writing, vol. 58–60, 2003, pp. 219–229. EBSCOhost, Project

MUSE - The Cultural Work of Serial Killers This article talks about what serial killers

are and how they are portrayed in novels and movies. Cassuto explores different works of

literature and feature films that portray serial killers as the main protagonist or antagonist.

He does several textual analysis and multimodal analysis to make his claims and state

how they are portrayed in the media. Detailing stories such as Thomas Harris’s Red

Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, plus the film adaptation, he explains how these

serial killers such as Hannibal Lector are portrayed by the author and what makes them

so intriguing for readers. Cassuto notes how the readers become so attracted to these

types of stories and almost always take the side of the victim that is attacked by the killer.

He also notes about how fictional serial killers differ from real life serial killers and how

that their victims are different. Fictional serial killers usually target middle class families,

while real life serial killers target social outcasts such as prostitutes, hustlers, and the

homeless. His findings conclude that “We once felt sorry for our mentally ill,but now

they disgust us—and because they disgust us, they're fair game for a collective effort at

monstrous objectification. Serial killer stories take care of this objectification for us. They

focus on personality disorders rather than mood disorders (such as the apparent
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schizophrenia that afflicts the killer in Brewer's novel)as a way of alienating the

character. These disordered personalities are then placed at the center of stories that push

the limit of representable horror even as they suggest even more grisly doings

backstage.The serial killer story portrays damaged humans who like to perform worse

acts than readers and viewers can bear to experience—and the strategy telling the story

centers on simultaneously pointing to and covering up the details of these acts, all in

order to create the worst possible monster.” (Cassuto 227).

The article by Cassuto is very similar to two of my other secondary

sources by Allué and Gibson, which explores the media portrayal of serial killers in

different movies and novels. Allué and Cassuto’s articles focus on The Silence of the

Lambs, but they offer different opinions on how the serial killer is portrayed. This article

will help me immensely to answer my research of how the media portrays serial killers

by allowing me to explore how the researchers see serial killers portrayed in novels and

movies. It gives me a foundation on how I will be able to see how the media portrays real

life serial killers such as Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. Now it also connects to the

articles of O’Connell and Grunder, and the article by Bartels by explaining the lore

behind real life serial killers and how they are dangerous people turned into monsters.

Allué, Sonia Baelo. “THE AESTHETICS OF SERIAL KILLING: WORKING

AGAINST ETHICS IN ‘THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS’ (1988) AND ‘AMERICAN

PSYCHO’ (1991).” Atlantis, vol. 24, no. 2, 2002, pp. 7–24. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/41055067. Accessed 3 Mar. 2020. This article looks into how two

novels with well known fictional serial killers are portrayed through ethics instead of

aesthetics. Allué explores how the two serial killers in The Silence of the Lambs and
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American Psycho are ethically created. To conduct her research and answer her question

of “However, what happens when ethics dominates over aesthetics in serial killer fiction”

(Allué 7), Allué uses multimodal textual analysis to achieve this. She explores how

American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman is portrayed completely differently from The Silence

of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lector. Her findings conclude that Lector and

Buffalo Bill fit into the mold of serial killer stories that glamorize the killer. They are

made the polarizing figures and the main center of attention for the audience to glue their

eyes onto. Meanwhile, Bateman falls into the other category of serial killer portrayal in

fiction. He falls under the type of serial killer who has no aesthetic sources of pleasure.

“There are no clues, no pattern, no strong detective and no arrest of the criminal. Ellis

plays with the predictability that generic fiction provides so as to undermine it and create

in the reader the opposite effect intended by generic fiction. There will be no restoration

of the social order. This kind of ending, apart from being a formal break characteristic of

postmodernism, also constitutes an ideological break with more traditional narrations like

``The Silence of the Lambs.” (Allué 22).

This secondary source is again related to the sources by Cassuto and

Gibson. All three of these secondary sources talk about how serial killers are portrayed in

a fictional world. It is closely related to my theme of portrayal of serial killers by the

media in a sense. It is not the traditional media like news outlets, but the media that talks

about hit films and novels. This source will greatly help me in my research by allowing

me to compare how the media portrays the real life serial killers to their fictional

counterparts. My primary research focuses on real life serial killers as my secondary

research focuses on fictional serial killers.

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Gibson, Brian. “KILLING IN THE NAME OF...NOTHING: THE SERIAL SEARCH

FOR MEANING AND THE ABSENCE OF DESIRE IN ‘THE MINUS MAN AND

DAHMER.’” Revue Canadienne D'Études Cinématographiques / Canadian Journal of

Film Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 2013, pp. 120–142. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24411811.

Accessed 8 Mar. 2020. This article also explores how serial killers are portrayed in two

foreign films. Gibson explores how the two serial killers in these films go along with

other serial killers who have been portrayed as going from man to monster, killing people

for absolutely no reason. Gibson uses multimodal textual analysis to get his findings.

Analyzing the movies The Minus Man and Dahmer, he finds out how each serial killer

goes from a normal man to a scary monster of a human being. He finds that each serial

killer commits their murders out of a lack of desire and sensitivity. Vann from The Minus

Man really portrays the minus sign with his indifference and gratuitous destruction. Vann

kills out of lack of desire, not to pass away. Dahmer suffers from desires of emptiness

causing him to murder people. As a result of this, he tries to eliminate the human as a

way to find wholeness and meaning to desire.

This secondary source is very similar to two other sources in my annotated

bibliography. Those two secondary sources are by Cassuto and Allué. All three sources

talk about how serial killers are portrayed in a fictional sense, and they all mention

famous serial killers from novels that turned into movies. This article by Gibson helps me

see how fictional serial killers are portrayed and helps provide me with a foundation of

what characteristics I should look for when trying to see how the media portrays real life

serial killers.
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Ball, Cheryl E. “Show, Not Tell: The Value of New Media Scholarship.” Computers and

Composition: An International Journal for Teachers of Writing, vol. 21, no. 4, 2004, pp.

403–425. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2004.08.001. Ball’s article explores how

the advances in publications going to the internet and online world has created this thing

called the new media. She enters the academic conversation by exploring how the

scholarship of new media works and the rhetorical strategies the new media uses. Using

textual analysis, Ball is able to provide a definition of the scholarship and rhetoric the

new media uses to allow people to understand it. She talks about how online publications

use new aspects such as videos or audio along with written text to enhance their

publications, and give the readers new ways of making meaning of these texts. Results of

her findings conclude that “. This text demonstrates how multimodal elements and new

media strategies such as the enactment of the text through a timeline can help readers

interpret meanings made through modes that move beyond linear, print traditions. Similar

to reading strategies in hypertext, where readers have to compose an argument based on

smaller lexias of meaning, the argument of this text can be gathered through reading and

interpreting the smaller sections and multiple modes the designer provided, even if those

modes aren’t easily recognized as valuable in a scholarly text.” (Ball 421).

This secondary source of mine is only sort of related to my secondary

source by Downs because they both talk about rhetoric. That is the only way this source

is related to anything else in my annotated bibliography. Ball’s article is still very useful

and essential for my research. First off, it provides me with valuable strategies when

conducting my primary research to know how to make meaning when reading online

publications. Second, it helps provide background information of what the new media is
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and how it works. All of my secondary sources are considered “new media” because they

are all published to online journals. Ball’s findings give me good foundations and

frameworks for my researched article.

Downs, Doug. “Rhetoric Making Sense of Human Interaction and Meaning-Making”.

Writing About Writing, edited by Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, Bedford St. Martin,

2017, pp. 457-481. This article by Downs is a guide and talks about all of the basic

principles of rhetoric. Downs explains what rhetoric is and how it is used to make

meaning of human interaction and all of the principles that make rhetoric what it is. He

uses textual analysis of other writing scholars who did research on rhetoric to help craft

his explanation of what rhetoric is. By the end of the article, Downs explains all of the

elements of rhetoric which are motivation, ecology, knowledge making, identification,

and canons or rhetorical arts. Rhetorical ecology has its own principles or elements which

are the rhetors/network, the context, the exigence, the kairos/the moment, and the

interaction and collaboration. Knowledge making in rhetoric involves the narrative /

making present, values, the values could have a pathos appeal or a mythos appeal, and

reasoning which takes the logos appeals. Identification in rhetoric uses the ethos appeal

and adherence. Downs also provides his own definition of what rhetoric is. That

definition is “rhetoric is a set of principles for human interaction that most people know

unconsciously but don’t think much about. Rhetorical principles organize and explain

much of human communication, interaction, and experience.” (Downs 458).

This article by Downs is very important for my research. It is one of the

two framework sources of my annotated bibliography, the other one being by Gee. My

research has the framework of what rhetoric the media uses to portray these real life
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serial killers and the discourse they use to make those claims. Using Downs’s article as a

framework allows me to conduct my research as writing and rhetoric related. Rhetoric is

an important framework to my research and this source helps me realize that.

Gee, Paul James. “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics”. Writing About Writing, edited

by Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, Bedford St Martin, 2017, pp. 274-294. This

article discusses the definition differences between Gee’s term Discourses from the

commonly known term of discourses. Gee writes this article to clearly express the

differences between the two and uses plentiful examples to do that. Gee does use

scholarly articles to help produce his definition of Discourses vs the definition of

discourses. Gee provides that his definition of Discourses are saying (writing)-doing-

being-valuing-believing associations that can be ways of being in the world and making

meaning of the world. That definition differs from the definition of discourses, which are

connected stretches of language that people use everyday to communicate. Gee identifies

that there are many different types of Discourses as well. He explains that there are

dominant and non dominant Discourses, and primary and secondary Discourses.

This article is the second framework of my research. While Downs’s

article helps me identify the rhetoric the media uses, Gee’s article allows me to figure out

the discourse the media uses and what Discourse the media is a part of. These two

frameworks make my research better and related to the field of writing studies. These two

frameworks are the foundation that I built my primary research on and are essential to

answering my research question of how the media portrays serial killers.