Belgium university launches English literature elective course on Taylor Swift
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
The course, titled Literature: Taylor’s Version, is believed to be the first of its kind in Europe, and will be available later in 2023 via the master’s degree in Language and Literature at Ghent University, according to news reports.
PHOTO: AFP
Follow topic:
Fans of Taylor Swift in Belgium will soon have a chance to delve deeper into the American singer-songwriter’s songs at a university.
A course, titled Literature: Taylor’s Version, is believed to be the first of its kind in Europe, and will be available later in 2023 via the master’s degree in Language and Literature at Ghent University, according to news reports.
British professor Elly McCausland, who will be teaching the course, told The Guardian that she pitched the idea after she was struck by the parallels between Swift’s lyrics and the English literature that the academic had long studied.
For instance, in Swift’s song The Great War, the assistant professor at the university saw echoes of how late American poet Sylvia Plath jarringly spoke of war and battle to convey her pain in the poem Daddy.
“I sort of thought, why is no one talking about this?” said Prof McCausland, who is reportedly a Swiftie, the nickname for a Swift fan.
She also hopes the course will excite students to explore the pioneers who helped shape literature between 900 and 1900, according to The Brussels Times.
“I want to show my students how much fun historical English literature can be,” said Prof McCausland in the report, according to Dutch newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws.
The course will also make links to stylistic devices and topics that writers have used for centuries based on the singer’s songs, said the report.
Prof McCausland added that “enough books have already been written about Shakespeare and other dead white men”.
It is also important to study modern female stars, she said.
“After all, sometimes students lose the sense of studying something useful and recognisable because it is so old. You need to learn how our history influences our modern literature,” she was quoted as saying in the report.
The course will also use Swift’s work as a springboard to explore works ranging from 14th-century writings to Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s take on The Tempest.
“What I want to do is show students that although these texts might seem inaccessible, they can be accessible if we look at them from a slightly different angle,” said Prof McCausland in The Guardian report.
“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.”
This is not the first time that a university is studying Swift’s work.
