A university in Europe is offering a Taylor Swift literature course
With the success of her Eras Tour, Taylor Swift is everywhere — and now she can even be found in a university classroom.
Starting this fall, the Belgium-based Ghent University is set to launch a course inspired by the singer-songwriter. Literature professor Elly McCausland told The Guardian that she came up with the idea when she noticed several parallels between Swift’s songs and famous works of literature.
The song “The Great War” reminded her of the Sylvia Plath poem “Daddy,” while “Mad Woman,” a song about gaslighting women, was similar to The Yellow Wallpaper, a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
“I sort of thought, why is no one talking about this?” said McCausland, an assistant professor and a longtime Swiftie.
@taylorswift/Instagram
What resulted is a course called “Literature: Taylor’s Version.” You don’t even need to have heard her songs, and being a Swiftie is certainly not a prerequisite. However, you do need to have completed at least one literature course to register.
Unfortunately for fans, it looks like the course is only available for university students and will require in-person attendance.
According to the description, the course offers “an in-depth look at key themes, topics, genres and techniques from English literature (c.900-1900) via the lens of modern popular music, specifically, the work of Taylor Swift.”
Literature professor Elly McCausland will be teaching the course (@ugent/Instagram | @nutmegs_seven/Twitter)
“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,” reads the description. “The focus of the course will be predominantly on English literature, with Swift used to introduce and contextualize the literature in question.”
Required readings include Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Margaret Atwood’s Haf Seed.
McCausland explained that the purpose of the course is to show students that these texts “can be accessible if we look at them from a slightly different angle.”
“So, Shakespeare, in some way, is actually addressing a lot of the same questions as Taylor Swift is today, which seems crazy. But he is,” she said.
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