Taylor Swift’s songwriting is going to be the subject of a new literature course at a university in the Lone Star state. The University of Texas at Austin is now offering students a songwriting course focused on the 11-time Grammy Award winner’s approach to crafting lyrics.
It is following in the footsteps of New York University. While the NYU course focused on Swift as a music entrepreneur, the UT Austin course will focus on Swift’s songwriting.
“We will study Swift’s songs as poems and literary structures”
Dr. Elizabeth Scala of UT Austin’s English department will teach “Literary Contests and Contexts: The Taylor Swift Songbook.” The new course will use Swift’s songwriting to teach “a wide range of skills.”
“Let’s turn that Easter Egg hunting and reading in detail to academic purposes!” the university’s English department wrote in a Facebook post promoting the course back in May.
“Swift is an intelligent and talented songwriter, and her writing skills are what made me focus on her,” Scala told the Austin American-Statesman.
Scala said her daughter introduced her to Swift in November, after the release of “Red (Taylor’s Version).”
“For me, it’s all about form (not just or even primarily about content),” she said. “We will study Swift’s songs as poems and literary structures.”
The course will use Taylor Swift’s songwriting to introduce literary critical reading and research methods-basic skills for work in English literature
“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,” Scala says.
“I’ll be showing students that these operations and interpretive moves one makes when reading her songs are appropriate to all forms of writing.”
The course will use “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 university’s website states.