Final month, Harvard introduced that I’d be instructing a class subsequent semester referred to as “Taylor Swift and Her World,” an open-enrollment lecture partly about Swift’s work and profession and partly about literature (poems, novels, memoirs) that overlaps with, or speaks to, that work. When the information got here out, my inbox blew up with dozens of requests, from as far-off as New Zealand. Reporters wished to know whether or not Swift would go to the course (not anticipating her to), whether or not her on-line superfans had been concerned (some will likely be), whether or not Harvard accepted (sure, not less than to this point), and, above all, why a Millennial pop star deserves this type of therapy at a world-class college.
In some methods, the reply is easy. If the humanities ought to review tradition, together with the tradition of the current day, and Taylor Swift is throughout that tradition, then in fact we should always ask why and the way the Swift phenomenon got here to be. That’s what a cultural historian of the long run would do, trying again at how Individuals embraced Swift as an artist, debated her rise, and altered their perceptions of her over time. It’s additionally what a cultural anthropologist would do, decoding the rituals round Swift’s concert events and album drops, or discovering cross-cultural patterns in the way in which that her followers reply to her voice and her work.
I’m a literary critic, although. I write and train, most frequently, about how particular person artworks and artists operate: how the components of a chunk of literature match collectively, how they sound, what they are saying, and what they do for us after we learn, hear, or see them. Does Taylor Swift actually advantage that type of consideration?
Once more, sure. Faculty English programs are in fact meant to problem college students, however college students additionally profit from finding out artwork that they love—artwork new and outdated, artwork in lots of genres. Artistic endeavors—not like, say, protein-folding experiments or criminal-law trials—exist to maneuver us, to please us, to remodel our emotional lives in addition to to vary our thoughts. Because the literary scholar Rita Felski has argued, we are able to study greatest about specific sorts of artwork, and why or whether or not they matter, by asking what they do to and for the individuals who love them—particularly if these persons are us.
My college students will analyze Swift’s work, suppose intimately about it, perhaps create footnotes to it, in an effort to see how the verbal expertise and musical parts that transfer us are usually not simply all in our head—they’re selections Swift makes to speak a specific message or feeling. College students will in flip achieve instruments for literary and cultural evaluation that they’ll take alongside as they examine different eras and different phrases, and hopefully uncover extra artwork that they love.
Folks love Taylor Swift for good causes. She is a songwriter of genius, each as a lyricist and as a musician—one whose work is refined sufficient to reward shut examine. Though it goes in opposition to a couple of generations of Dylanology, faculty lessons on Beatles lyrics, and the prefer to say this, songs (not less than within the period of recorded music) don’t work the way in which page-based poems do—no extra so, not less than, than novels work like stage performs or stand-up comedy works like memoirs. Taylor Swift writes witty, insightful, typically profound phrases that require tunes and music, and the music requires the phrases. I’m no musicologist, however I do know one thing about chords and melodies, and my class will take a look at how they drive and assist her lyrics.
To take one instance: Swift’s 2022 music “Anti-hero,” which addresses her public picture and the way in which that each she and her followers have considered her tumultuous, breakup-studded love life. The ultimate line of the refrain—“It have to be exhausting all the time rooting for the anti-hero”—speaks to the standing she is aware of she’s gained, because the goal of each parasocial devotion and brickbats. She is aware of that her followers may be getting uninterested in defending her in opposition to each slight, however she absolutely feels exhausted too; she’s projecting. The music’s pressure comes by not simply within the phrases however within the descending leaps that carry the vocal melody, ending the refrain a full octave plus a serious third under the excessive me close to the place the refrain begins. The antihero will get a swift descent, and an anticlimax: She’s uninterested in her turmoil, and he or she is aware of we’re too, however we hold watching.
I’m not the one one who believes Swift’s physique of labor suits this type of evaluation. (I’m not even the one faculty professor instructing a category about her.) My college students will likely be studying my favourite literary writers’ pop-music criticism (Carl Wilson’s, for instance), about Swift and different artists. We will likely be listening to and serious about different pop-song writers whose talent units overlap with Swift’s—a few of them well-known, like Dolly Parton and Prince, and others (Scott Miller, Marcy Mays, Keith Girdler) who had worse luck or fewer extramusical expertise to navigate the star-making equipment.
I’d not be instructing this course if I didn’t love Swift’s songs. However I’d not be instructing this course, both, if I couldn’t usher in different artworks, from different genres and time intervals, that may assist my college students higher perceive Swift and her oeuvre. We will likely be studying two novels by Willa Cather about ambition, expertise, and femininity in an earlier Center America—novels about younger girls who need to turn into self-sustaining, acknowledged musicians, one who succeeds and one who fails. We will likely be studying James Weldon Johnson’s sharp-edged, irony-driven 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex–Coloured Man, a couple of very totally different set of limitations for a younger man who seeks musical success.
We may even take a look at three centuries of page-based poetry, meant to be learn, not sung, on different subjects central to Swift: childhood nostalgia and maturity remorse (William Wordsworth); girlhood, daughters, and heterosexual pessimism (Laura Kasischke); reactions to the haters and the low-down soiled cheats (Alexander Pope). I’ll take benefit, frankly, of a classroom stuffed with Swifties to introduce lots of of scholars to those poems. I may even assist us attend to the way in which these poems describe being 15, or being 7, or being a continuing goal for unruly followers and resentful rivals within the streets of London—an expertise that the Swift of her album Popularity shared with the Pope who wrote the nice “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.”
Folks (like me) who suppose that faculty English programs ought to examine artworks we have the benefit of will, I hope, be pleased with these selections. So will individuals (like me) who suppose that faculty English programs ought to construct analytical expertise that may be utilized in different contexts. As for the individuals (not like me) who suppose that faculty English lessons ought to give attention to classics, on works which have stood the check of time (how a lot time? whose check? what sorts of works?), I hope they’ll find yourself pleased with this course too. In order for you, and I do, extra undergraduates to learn Pope and Wordsworth, Cather and Johnson, you would possibly discover what number of college students will come for the Taylor and keep for the opposite writers concerned.
The course, if it really works, isn’t only a option to write about and take heed to plenty of Swift. It’s a means into centuries of literary creation in novels and memoirs, page-based verse, and prose. It’s a means, too, into literary and cultural reception: What do followers do with the work and the artists they admire? That mentioned, it’s additionally a means by the work of 1 specific artist, one who has proven many people her life, and even our personal life, in her songs—an artist worthy of examine, an artist so many people already love.
