From “Alice in Wonderland” to “The Great Gatsby”, “Rebecca” to “Jane Eyre”, the songs of singer-songwriter Taylor Swift are crammed with clear and delicate literary references.
Now, a literature professor in Belgium has seized on the bookish qualities of Swift’s lyrics to launch a course utilizing the U.S. celebrity’s songs to delve into the greats of English writing and the themes of their work.
For Elly McCausland, an assistant professor at Ghent University, Swift’s songs supply a possibility to discover feminism, for instance via “The Man”, and the anti-hero trope via the aptly named tune “Anti-Hero” from her 2022 album, “Midnights”.
McCausland determined earlier this yr to mastermind a course to start out in September impressed by Swift’s work after listening to “The Great War”, additionally from “Midnights”.
“The way she uses the war, like a metaphor for a relationship, made me a bit uncomfortable and it got me thinking about Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’, which does a similar thing and also it’s very uncomfortable reading,” the educational instructed AFP.
McCausland knew all too nicely the ability of the singer’s work as a “real Swiftie” herself and insists that the course, “Literature (Taylor’s Version)”, is a strategy to make literature “more accessible” and “not to create a Swift fan club”.
“The whole point is to get people to think that English literature is not a load of old books from a long time ago festering in a library. But it’s a living, breathing thing and it’s continually evolving and changing,” she mentioned.
The tutorial burdened different artists and media may very well be used for a similar objective, for instance, Beyonce and even the video-sharing platform TikTok.
McCausland’s course makes use of Swift’s lyrics as a gateway into studying a number of the greats of the literary canon comparable to William Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Thackeray.
Swift refers back to the works of a number of extra writers, together with Charles Dickens and Emily Dickinson, and McCausland famous parallels additionally with the type of different writers together with British Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century.
In the songs “Wonderland” and “long story short”, Swift mentions taking place a “rabbit hole”, a reference to Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”.
In a 2020 dialog with Paul McCartney revealed by Rolling Stone in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the songwriter described her love of phrases and the way she was “reading so much more than I ever did,” together with Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca”.
The course may be very widespread and McCausland has acquired requests to hitch from outdoors the college, even by way of personal messages on Instagram.
There has been snobbery and criticism on-line, questioning the benefit of utilizing Swift’s work in greater schooling. McCausland made parallels with the scepticism singer-songwriter Bob Dylan confronted after successful the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature.
Swift has gone from power to power since her debut album in 2006, reaching the head of her profession this yr with the Eras Tour, at present competing with Beyonce’s Renaissance to turn into the primary billion-dollar tour.
The 33-year-old additionally this yr grew to become the primary girl to have 4 albums within the prime 10 of the U.S. charts on the similar time.
Swift reveals no inclination to decelerate as she prepares for the Latin American leg of her tour beginning subsequent week earlier than Asia, Australia, Europe and North America in 2024, all whereas getting ready to launch a re-recording of her 2014 album “1989” this October.
While McCausland’s course is maybe the primary of its type in Europe, throughout the Atlantic, New York University’s Clive Davis Institute is believed to have launched the primary course centered on the songwriter final yr.
And in London, there was a summer season faculty at Queen Mary University in July, titled “Taylor Swift and Literature”, her work via a equally literary lens.
© 2023 AFP