Studying Shakespeare ... and Taylor Swift
Performer’s songwriting to be taught on university course alongside giants of literature
TO Shake It Off or not to Shake It Off?
That is the question facing students of English at one university who will be offered a literature course on Taylor Swift’s songwriting this term.
The 32-year-old’s hits will be studied on the Literary Contests And Contexts: The Taylor Swift Songbook course alongside giants such as Shakespeare and Keats.
Preliminary texts for the course include Miss Swift’s recent albums Evermore, Folklore, Lover and Red (Taylor’s Version).
The course will be taught to students on the liberal arts honours programme at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA).
They will be graded on four writing assignments as well as class participation in discussions and debates.
The university’s website states: ‘Students will address topics such as gender, authenticity and the authorship of a writer’s texts, as well as the ways in which readers and fans impact how artists and writers work and produce.’
Elizabeth Scala, professor of English at UTA, who is teaching the course, said: ‘I want to show fans how, in fact, Swift draws on richer literary traditions in her song-writing... in terms of how she uses references, metaphors and clever manipulations of words. I’ll be showing students that the operations and interpretive moves one makes when reading her songs are appropriate to all forms of writing.’
According to Professor Scala, Miss Swift – whose hits include Shake It Off, Love Story and I Knew You Were Trouble – uses motifs that ‘have counterparts in literary traditions’.
‘Poetry and storytelling emerged as literary forms sung and accompanied by music,’ she said. ‘I think it’s important to connect the curriculum to the present, but I’m not willing to cede the past. This is my way of sneaking the older material back in with relevance.’
It is not the first time that Miss Swift has appeared on a university syllabus. New York University offered a course this year on the singer as a musical entrepreneur and the pop and country songwriters that inspired her work.