The College of Texas from Austin is providing students a chance to research Taylor Swift lyrics together with works by such fictional icons as Shakespeare, John Keats and yes, Robert Frost .
The school is offering an undergrad course — “The Taylor Swift Songbook” — this fall as part of its liberal artistry honors program. It is about on the heels of a Swift-themed class on New York University final spring that ended with the singer as the commencement speaker .
British Professor Elizabeth Scala told CNN that will she picked Swift because the pop star writes her own music and her words can help illuminate similar techniques from traditional poetry.
“This is a course on her tracks as literary creating and the ways a popular and award-winning writer uses the same fictional devices, figures, plus tropes of conventional poetry in the girl work, ” she said. “It is just not about celebrity or even fame. ”
Students will research Swift’s songs alongside the writings associated with Western literature greats.
“They’ll be asked to analyze and contextualize common practices and problems across the centuries, ” Scala stated.
Scala is a self-described Swift fan plus said her objective is to teach fictional traditions through a modern lens.
“I want to get what Swift supporters can already perform at a sophisticated level, tease it to them a bit with a different vocabulary, then show them how, in fact , Swift draws on richer literary customs in her songwriting, both topically but also formally in terms of exactly how she uses references, metaphors, and clever manipulations of words and phrases, ” Scala stated.
“I’ll be displaying students that these functions and interpretive moves one makes whenever reading her music are appropriate to all forms of writing. ”
This becoming 2022, Scala also offers set up an Instagram for the class on which she content Swift trivia and poses questions in order to fans.
The class will mostly focus on songs from Swift’s recent albums, but students are free to bring up older songs for discussion, Scala said. With most of the lyrics published online and the tracks available on Apple Music or Spotify, students don’t have to buy songs for the class, the lady said.
The training course also will address subjects such as gender, authenticity, fans’ influence upon artists and authors, and how language background and linguistic customs enrich the reading experience, Scala stated.
“I think it’s important to link the curriculum to the current, but I’m not really willing to cede the past. This is my method of sneaking the older material back in with relevance, ” she added.
In 2015, UT Austin introduced a course titled , “Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna Womanism” to explore Black feminism. Other universities also have made headlines meant for courses centered on pop stars, including the University associated with Copenhagen’s “Beyoncé, Gender and Race” and an University or college of South Carolina sociology course dedicated to the work of Lady Gaga.
Next spring, Texas State University will offer a class on British pop singer Harry Designs .