A university in Texas is offering students the chance to study Taylor Swift’s songwriting.
The course – The Taylor Swift Songbook – will fill a blank space in the line-up at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) from this autumn.
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 students will hope to know all too well by the end of their studies.
Preliminary texts include the pop megastar’s albums Red (Taylor’s Version), Lover, Folklore and Evermore.
UTA said the course will “consider frameworks for understanding her work, such as poetic form, style, and history among various matters and theoretical issues”.
According to its description on the UTA website, the new course “uses 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.”
“Focusing on Swift’s music and the cultural contexts in which it and her career are situated, we’ll consider frameworks for understanding her work, such as poetic form, style, and history among various matters and theoretical issues important to contextualisation as we practice close and in-depth reading, evaluating secondary sources, and building strong arguments,” it adds.
UTA’s course follows one offered by New York University, which developed a course based on Swift’s status as a music entrepreneur, along with the songwriters who have influenced her.
Swift received an honorary doctor of fine arts from NYU earlier this year and delivered a moving speech at its commencement ceremony.
In July, another university in Texas announced it would be offering a course based on the work of Harry Styles from 2023.