Taylor Swift’s songwriting will be the subject of a new literature course at a Texas university.
The course – The Taylor Swift Songbook – will fill a gap in the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) schedule starting this fall.
It means the pop megastar’s songs will be ‘read’ alongside other UK and US literary giants such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Keats and other artists that students expect to know all too well by the end of the their studies
The course will use “the songwriting of pop music icon Taylor Swift to introduce critical literary reading and research methods: basic skills for working in English literature and other humanities,” according to a description on the website of the UTA
“Focusing on Swift’s music and the cultural contexts in which it and her career are situated, we will consider frameworks for understanding her work, such as poetic form, style, and history among various themes and theoretical issues important to to contextualization as we practice closely and deep reading, evaluating secondary sources, and building strong arguments,” he adds.
For those who feel ready, preliminary texts include the albums Red (Swift’s Version), Lover, Folklore and Evermore.
UTA follows in the footsteps of New York University (NYU), which previously helped fans fulfill their wildest dreams by offering a course on Swift as a music entrepreneur and the various pop and country music songwriters who helped give form to his work.
The singer boosted her reputation by receiving an honorary doctorate of fine arts from NYU earlier this year.
The new course also comes after an independent university in Texas announced it will offer a course based on Harry Styles’ work from 2023.
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Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet, and European Pop Culture will be offered at the Texas State University Honors College beginning next spring.
It will focus on the pop star’s work in music and film to “understand the cultural and political development of the modern celebrity.”