- Taylor Swift is a global sensation
- Now you can take a class about her lyrics
- Her music has literary roots
Taylor Swift's lyrics become a university course subject
According to McCausland, "Swift makes frequent allusions to canonical literary texts in her music". "Using Swift’s work as a springboard, we will explore, among other topics, literary feminism, ecocriticism, fan studies, and tropes such as the anti-hero," reads the course syllabus.
Swift’s enduring popularity stems, at least in part, from the heavily intertextual aspect of her work, and this course will dig deeper to explore its literary roots, the syllabus continues. Even those who aren't fans of Taylor Swift are encouraged to take the course, 'CNN' reports.
"The purpose of the course is to think critically about Swift as an artist and writer, and to use the popularity of her music as a ‘way in’ to a corpus of literature that may have shaped her work," the syllabus states. McCausland said that she'd been considering Swift's lyrics for analysis for quite some time, but the release of 'Midnights' last fall "really crystallized" the notion.
"There’s a song on there called ‘The Great War,’ which uses the First World War as an analogy for heartbreak… That made me think of Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy,’ in which she uses the Holocaust to discuss her troubled relationship with her father," Elly McCausland says in a statement.
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"This appropriation of historical pain and war as a metaphor (for love and loss)— I started thinking about other literary parallels and that’s where the course came from," she continues. The course "is believed to be the first of its kind in Europe," 'CNN' reports.
