Hannah Walton-Hughes
Ghent University in Belgium has announced a new English Literature course, titled ‘Literature: Taylor’s Version’, centring the work of Taylor Swift.
What is ‘Literature: Taylor’s Version’?
‘Literature: Taylor’s Version’ will be run by Ghent University’s assistant professor, Elly McCausland. A self-proclaimed “longtime Swiftie”, McCausland has described Taylor Swift as a “perfect writer to explore.”
The course syllabus features historical canonical writers like Chaucer and Shakespeare. However, McCausland uses Swift’s music as a “springboard” to explore the themes and techniques of many of the texts in the course.
McCausland has identified various parallels between Swift’s songs and the literature she has studied, revealing these links to be a great way to connect with fellow Swiftie students.
She has also identified ties between Swift’s 2020 song ‘Mad Women’ and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), drawing comparisons in thematic concerns of mental health and patriarchy.
The 2022 song ‘The Great War’ has also been compared to Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’, due to the shared themes of war, battle and pain.
Responses to Ghert University’s Taylor Swift Literature Course
While the course is thought to be the first of its kind in Europe, over half a dozen Taylor Swift-inspired courses have appeared in the USA in recent years. This includes a course by New York University’s Clive Davis Institute, which studies the career legacies of Swift, as well as other pop and country songwriters. The NYU course also encourages students to consider discourses of girlhood and youth and race politics in contemporary pop culture.
McCausland admitted that she had received pushback on social media against the course, but she believes this demonstrates the necessity of the course at universities.
“It gets people talking about what is literature, what is the canon. Can any text be literature?”
She encourages Swift and non-Swift fans alike to take the elective, which is grounded in academia.
“The primary focus is literature, but also I want us to think critically about Swift. I’m absolutely not gathering all of the Swifties and we’re going to spend three hours every Monday fangirling,” McCausland said.
Swift is now the first woman to have four simultaneous albums in the Top 10 of the US album charts. Whilst this course remains one-of-a-kind in Europe, Taylor Swift’s ever-expanding fanbase could begin to influence the way that higher education providers deliver their teaching.
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hwaltonh13
I am an aspiring political journalist, and am passionate about writing and reporting on local, national, and international news. Currently, I am a second year Undergraduate student studying English with Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham. I am a regular contributor to the News, Features, Reviews and Entertainment sections of the University's magazine, Impact, where I also hold the position of Head of the Reviews section. I am a member of the News team at University Radio Nottingham, where I am a panelist on the weekly News and Political shows, as well as partaking in reporting. Previous work experience includes a week's placement at Your LocalLink Magazine in York, in addition to shadowing MP Jason McCartney in Parliament. See my LinkedIn page for more. Over lockdown, I appeared on BBC Radio York during York, discussing my Creative Writing.