Taylor Swift ‘Songbook’ Class Offered at University of Texas – Billboard

By the time a handful of University of Texas at Austin college students are carried out with this upcoming semester, they’re going to be all too nicely versed in Taylor Swift‘s discography. The school recently unveiled a new liberal arts course taught by English professor Elizabeth Scala that will focus on the 32-year-old singer-songwriter’s decades-spanning songbook, out there to college students beginning this fall.

According to the web description for the course — titled Literary Contests and Contexts — The Taylor Swift Songbook — the star’s work might be taught alongside that of well-known poets akin to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wyatt, Coleridge, Keats, Dickenson and Plath. Required texts particularly embody the 11-time Grammy winner’s 4 most up-to-date albums — Red (Taylor’s Version), Lover, Folklore and Evermore — and a Spotify account is really useful.

“This course uses 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 outline reads. “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.”

Students might be evaluated with 4 writing assignments in addition to class participation in discussions and debates.

“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, both topically but also formally in terms of how she uses references, metaphors, and clever manipulations of words,” Scala mentioned in a Tuesday (Aug. 23) interview on UTA’s web site.

With the brand new course, UTA turns into the newest faculty to affix in on a budding pattern of putting in Swift-themed programs. New York University supplied a course final spring inspecting the pop star’s entrepreneurship and relationship to the music trade and society on the whole, and at the tip of that very same semester, she was NYU’s graduation speaker.

“I’ll be showing students that these operations and interpretive moves one makes when reading her songs are appropriate to all forms of writing,” Scala continued. “All of the interesting contexts for literature are alive in [Swift’s] work right now.”