Archetype Analysis
In Rachel Monroe’s Savage Appetites, she outlines four archetypes of women in
connection to true crime: the detective, the victim, the defender, and the killer. In
this assignment, you will explore your own identification (or dis-identification) with
Monroe’s archetypes in terms of your own relationship to true crime. In essence,
this assignment is a hybrid of personal narrative and literary analysis, resulting in a
cohesive argument.
You do not have to identify with any of the archetypes. You are encouraged to
challenge, reframe, question, or otherwise interrupt Monroe’s framework. For
example, you might partially identify with all four archetypes in different ways in
different moments, identify with none of them and introduce a fifth archetype, find
shortcomings with Monroe’s definition of an archetype and offer your own angle on
that archetype, respond in the hypothetical (“If book X had done A & B, then….”), or
any other approach that authentically speaks to your understanding of, perspective
on, and engagement with true crime.
To demonstrate your argument, you will provide a sustained and complex
engagement with and close reading of Monroe’s book and at least two other books
from our class, one of which must be something you did not write about in either the
literature review or the definitional argument; you will draw from a minimum of
four secondary (scholarly/critical) sources to augment your analysis, one of which
must be a peer-reviewed journal article. Additional evidence can come from any
genre, either from our class or not, including podcasts, documentaries, social media,
trending stories, personal experiences, and other mediums of “true crime” broadly
construed.
Your identity—your background, your race/class/gender/country or state of
origin/etc—occupies an important place in this assignment. With this in mind,
careful use of first person is a must, as is artfully constructed anecdotal evidence. At
the same time, the assignment calls for complex analysis of true crime texts and the
manner in which you engaged with these texts. Therefore, the assignment demands
a sophisticated and nuanced blend of scholarly and personal writing.
I recommend you go back through your notes to see how you responded to certain
moments in the books we read. Look at your live tweets. Think about how you
position yourself when reading the news. Really reflect on where you see yourself,
how you feel connected or disconnected to the stories told in true crime, when you
felt moments of resistance, camaraderie, guilt, identification, pain, resentment, fear,
anger, optimism, and other important responses to this complex genre.
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