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Essay Instructions: Text book is Challenging Perspectives by Holdstein. P 529~544 Works Cited,too. Argue that urban legends, like gossip, answer a "wide range of human needs," as Gail Collins argues in "Scorpion Tongues" (529). Your research will be looking up several urban legends, such as in the website Snopes. In paragraph 1, summarize Collins' essay. In paragraph 2, your thesis, argue that urban legends perform the same functions as gossip. In paragraphs 3-7, you might show how 4 urban legends address the same functions described by Collins. In paragraph 8, your conclusion, reiterate your thesis.
1. We must distinguish between malicious-inspired gossip and skeptical-inspired gossip.
2. People who accept the official representation of truth are annoying and na?ve.
3. People who gossip vigorously seem more intelligent than non-gossipers.
4. A society cannot be moral without gossip since gossip is a way of exposing fraud and pretentiousness.
5. Gossip is a form of moral outrage.
6. In the Internet Age, gossip can spread and become a social movement.
7. All literature, including Shakespeare and the Bible, is based on gossip. Take gossip out of literature and no one would read.
8. Margaret Wenig?s well-intentioned gossip prohibitions (?Oops! I Shouldn?t Say This . . . or Should I??) are so drastic as to having a chilling effect on thought and imagination.
9. Gossip and skepticism come from the same part of the brain.
10. Not all gossip is rooted in intelligence. The lowest kind of gossip is where we want famous people?s dirty secrets in order to relish in schadenfreude.
11. When we listen to gossip to live vicariously through celebrities, we are flaunting the pathetic feebleness of our existence.
12.Our appetite for prurient gossip is insatiable, it feeds the payrolls of cable news hacks, and keeps our heads in the sand as real news passes us by.
I'm taking English 1C so you can see the class assignment!!
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Essay Instructions: Interview three people of different generations (ideally, one older, younger and peer-group) about their relationship to horror/das Unheimliche.

Some possible interview directions:

1. How do they define it? How have they experienced it? What do they find scary?

2. What mediated horror are they familiar with, or do they remember - films, TV, radio, web, texts or comics? Do they have any use for mediated horror?

3. What localized urban legends or myths do they recall? What experiences (if they'd like to share) still remain in memory? What real-life cases (solved or unsolved) remain in memory?

Include brief background on individuals interviewed, including age, gender, geographic background. Please include your framing questions too; if you'd like to submit the assignment as a transcript, that's fine.

Also include a "concluding" paragraph about possible commonalities - or conversely, disconnections exist within generations - regarding the experience of horror.