Belgian University Offers Course , to Study Taylor Swift Lyrics.
Belgium's Ghent University will debut a new course this fall called "Literature: Taylor's Version.".
The course was developed by assistant professor Elly McCausland, who also has a blog called "Swifterature," CNN reports.
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According to McCausland, "Swift makes frequent allusions to canonical literary texts in her music.".
Using Swift’s work as a springboard, we will explore, among other topics, literary feminism, ecocriticism, fan studies, and tropes such as the anti-hero.
, Via course syllabus .
Swift’s enduring popularity stems, at least in part, from the heavily intertextual aspect of her work, and this course will dig deeper to explore its literary roots, Via course syllabus .
Even those who aren't fans of Taylor Swift are encouraged to take the course, CNN reports.
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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, Via course syllabus .
McCausland said that she'd been considering Swift's lyrics for analysis for quite some time, but the release of 'Midnights' last fall "really crystallized" the notion.
There’s a song on there called ‘The Great War,’ which uses the First World War as an analogy for heartbreak… That made me think of Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy,’ in which she uses the Holocaust to discuss her troubled relationship with her father.
, Elly McCausland, via statement.
This appropriation of historical pain and war as a metaphor (for love and loss)— I started thinking about other literary parallels and that’s where the course came from, Elly McCausland, via statement.
The course "is believed to be the first of its kind in Europe," CNN reports
