Taylor Swift’s songwriting becomes the subject of a new literature course at a university in Lone Star.
The University of Texas at Austin now offers students a songwriting course focused on how the 11-time Grammy Award winner creates lyrics.
The English professor Dr. Elizabeth Scala, dubbed “Literary Contests and Contexts: The Taylor Swift Songbook,” will be teaching the course starting this fall.
Swift’s songs will now be read alongside the work of literary giants such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Frost and Keats, according to the university’s website.
“Let’s turn Easter egg hunting and reading into academic purposes in detail,” the university’s English department wrote in a Facebook post in May.
“Swift is an intelligent and talented songwriter, and her writing skills made me focus on her,” Scala told the Austin American-Statesman.
She said her daughter introduced her to Swift’s music in November, shortly after the release of “Red (Taylor’s Version).”
“I want to do what Swift fans can already do at an advanced level, tease it for them a little bit with a different vocabulary, and then show them how Swift actually draws on richer literary traditions in her songwriting,” says Scala. .
“I’ll show students that these operations and interpretive moves you make when reading her songs are appropriate for all forms of writing.”
The course will “use the songwriting of pop music icon Taylor Swift to introduce literary critical reading and research methods – foundational skills for work in English literature and other humanities disciplines,” states the university’s website.
“By focusing on Swift’s music and the cultural context in which she and her career are situated, we will consider frameworks for understanding her work, such as poetic form, style and history, between different matters and theoretical issues important to contextualization. while we practice closely and read in depth, evaluate secondary sources and build strong arguments,” adds the source description.
Preliminary lyrics of the course include albums Red (Taylor’s Version), Lover, Folklore and Evermore.
New York University was the first to create a course in Swift’s honor, but their course covers the singer as a music entrepreneur and focuses on the songwriters who shaped her work.
Swift received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from NYU earlier this year.