Dr. Cari Keebaugh

Course description excerpts:

 

LIT103: Superheroes, Sleuths, and Singing Soufflés -- Adaptation in Pop Culture

"Iron Man, Sherlock Holmes, Belle: these popular characters, and many like them, would be lost to time and relegated to a dusty bookshelf in someone's basement - except that they were adapted. Our investigation of adaptations will push past the surface-level matter of fidelity and will explore the tensions between multiple versions of a text. Our goal will be to determine what such tensions can tell us about history, culture, and the constant shifting of societal expectations. In short, we'll ask what these adaptations tell us about both our past and ourselves. We will also spend some time discussing the anxiety surrounding genre and cultural capital generated by adaptations, exploring how telling stories in a particular medium can perpetuate or diminish a text’s value for a given audience." 

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CMP122: Children's Literature

"This course introduces the student to methods of carefully analyzing literary genres: specifically, fiction, fairy tales, and drama. ... This course will explore special considerations that need to be kept in mind when analyzing and evaluating children’s literature, including whether or not children’s literature “exists” in the way we generally think of it and what elements define children’s literature. While most of the skills covered in this course translate to adult works, some are unique to children’s literature. ... Students are encouraged to appreciate (children’s) literature as a complex art form and to develop a critical sense of the field as employed by various authors in various genres."

 

LIT210: American Literature (online)

"In this online survey course, students will explore works of American authors spanning from pre-colonialism to the Civil War. Specifically, this class will examine the relevance of early American literature in today's society. Students will be asked to analyze the various ways that early American literature informs our current culture, such as in the form of iconic characters like Bugs Bunny (during a unit on Native American trickster legends) to the way education systems have changed."

 

CMP101: Composition I

"Rhetoric is used every day to persuade, both inside and outside the college classroom. The first goal of this class ... will be to explore the strategies commonly found in academic and popular discourses .... The second purpose of this class is to cover the basics of research, documentation, and avoiding plagiarism ... The context of our class will be derived from pop culture, contemporary scholarship, and students’ own unique interests."