{"id":10891,"date":"2016-08-04T15:44:18","date_gmt":"2016-08-04T19:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/?page_id=10891"},"modified":"2016-08-26T12:25:54","modified_gmt":"2016-08-26T16:25:54","slug":"instructor-wu","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/journal\/past-issues\/issue-8\/wu\/instructor-wu\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Instructor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What strikes me most about Jeffrey Wu\u2019s wonderful essay \u201cThe Greater Good: Analyzing the Morality of <em>Watchmen<\/em>\u201d is its deft handling of sources. This essay\u2014the capstone for our WR 150 course, \u201cMonsters\u201d\u2014originally began as a proposal with a very different topic: Jeffrey wanted to write about Zach Snyder\u2019s film adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons\u2019 graphic novel. As he researched the critical conversation around <em>Watchmen<\/em>, though, he encountered a problem: there is an almost overwhelming amount of scholarly writing about the novel, and little to none about Snyder\u2019s film. At the same time, Jeffrey discovered a pattern in that criticism that he decided to investigate further: critics were writing their essays about only one character in <em>Watchmen<\/em>, or setting them in parallel rather than analyzing them together. If they could not see how the characters form different pieces in a single puzzle, they could not see the puzzle as a whole; their conclusions about the book were partial at best. This observation became the kernel of the final essay.<\/p>\n<p>Throughout the essay, Jeffrey demonstrates a deep familiarity with his exhibit source as well as with the critical conversation around it. Unlike many students who write about graphic fiction, Jeffrey attends to the art of <em>Watchmen <\/em>in addition to its written text; this is especially impressive in his exploration of the book\u2019s watch motif. His startling insight that the countdown clock to the next catastrophe has been visually restarted at the end of the novel leads to his brilliant conclusion: by leaving <em>Watchmen<\/em>\u2019s ending unresolved and its moral universe undetermined, Moore and Gibbons want to encourage readers to develop their own moral stances\u2014and perhaps to avoid the next catastrophe in our own world.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u2014 MARIE MCDONOUGH<\/strong><br \/>\n<span>WR 150:\u00a0Monsters<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What strikes me most about Jeffrey Wu\u2019s wonderful essay \u201cThe Greater Good: Analyzing the Morality of Watchmen\u201d is its deft handling of sources. This essay\u2014the capstone for our WR 150 course, \u201cMonsters\u201d\u2014originally began as a proposal with a very different topic: Jeffrey wanted to write about Zach Snyder\u2019s film adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4801,"featured_media":0,"parent":10858,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10891"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4801"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10891"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10980,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10891\/revisions\/10980"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}