LIT103 Superheroes, Sleuths, and Singing Souffles: 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.

Credits

Prerequisite

Communication proficiency

Electives

HUM - Humanities Elective
LA - Liberal Arts Elective
MTHA - Mass Transfer Humanities Arts
OPEN - Open Elective