Taylor Swift’s songwriting is to be the subject of a new literature course at a university in the Lone Star state.
The University of Texas at Austin is now offering students a songwriting course focused on the 11-time Grammy Award winner’s approach to crafting lyrics.
Dubbed “Literary Contests and Contexts: The Taylor Swift Songbook,” English professor Dr. Elizabeth Scala will teach the course starting this fall.
Swift’s songs will now be read aloud alongside work by literary giants such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Frost, and Keats, according to the university’s website.
“Let’s turn that Easter Egg hunting and reading in detail to academic purposes,” the university’s English department wrote in a Facebook post in May.
“Swift is an intelligent and talented songwriter, and her writing skills are what 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 take what Swift fans can already do at a sophisticated level, tease it out for them a bit with a different vocabulary, and then show them how, in fact, Swift draws on richer literary traditions in her songwriting,” Scala says.
“I’ll be showing students that these operations and interpretive moves one makes when reading her songs are appropriate to all forms of writing.”
The course will use “the songwriting of pop music icon Taylor Swift to introduce literary critical reading and research methods-basic skills for work in English literature and other humanities disciplines,” the university’s website states.
“Focusing on Swift’s music and the cultural contexts in which it and her career are situated, we’ll consider frameworks for understanding her work, such as poetic form, style, and history among various matters and theoretical issues important to contextualization as we practice close and in-depth reading, evaluating secondary sources, and building strong arguments,” the source description adds.
Preliminary texts of the course include albums Red (Taylor’s Version), Lover, Folklore, and Evermore.
New York University was the first to create a course in honor of Swift, however, their course covers the singer as a music entrepreneur, and focuses on the songwriters that shaped her work.
Earlier this year, Swift received an honorary fine arts doctorate from NYU.
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