To the most predictable records because she is one of the greatest current icons of pop music, which made her the first artist to exceed $1 billion in revenue with the tour. “The Eras tour”singer Taylor Swift added another milestone: the prestigious Harvard University launched a course based on the lyrics of the Pennsylvania artist’s songs.
“The curriculum is very similar to what one might expect from a university English course, with texts from William Wordsworth, Willa Cather and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But there is one name on the list that might surprise researchers: Taylor Swift,” he described. Madison Malone Kircher in The New York Times. In the American spring semester, the specialist Stephanie Burt professor of English at Harvard University, will teach a course called “Taylor Swift and her world”. And they already have 300 students enrolled.
“Each week some of your work will be combined with some of other people’s work. We are preparing two different novels of Willa Cather. Also a novel by James Weldon Johnson about an artist who has a very different relationship with his own career on his hands and a contemporary novel by Zan Romanoff about the fandom one direction“Burt detailed to the New York newspaper and added: “We are going to read some of Wordsworth. Wordsworth also writes about some of the same feelings that Taylor sings about: disappointment in hindsight and looking back and realizing that you are not the child you were, even if you wanted to be.”
According to the teacher, the practical written work includes academic essays, where the student must present a well-founded argument, with clearly structured evidence. One of the texts has to be based on a theme by the American singer, while the other has to be developed with the contents studied in the course. Burt also confirmed that there is a final project at the end of the course.
“Our Taylor Swift course at Harvard is so popular that we need additional teaching assistants,” he said. Stephanie Burt about the course titled “English 183ts”, and added: “We will learn to study fan culture, celebrity culture, adolescence, adulthood and appropriation; how to think about white texts, southern texts, transatlantic texts, and queer subtexts.”
In an article in The Times, where the singer was named “Person of the Year”, Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare specialist, described the singer as “a real poet.” Furthermore, she detected explicit references to great authors such as Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Although the fact that the composer of “Willow” and “Cruel Summer” have a course inspired by her work at the distinguished university located in the state of Massachusetts, it is not the first time that university studies have been carried out on the singer. New York University and the University of Texas at Austinoffered the first classes on Taylor Swift, which were joined, shortly after, by other study centers such as Stanford, the University of Missouri or the University of Arizona.
For its part, in February the University of Melbourne (Australia) will hold the first academic symposium dedicated to Swift, to which 400 experts from 78 institutions around the world, belonging to 60 different disciplines, have applied. Furthermore, new universities, from the elitist Berklee College of Music in Boston to Rice University in Houstonare finalizing courses on the artist for their spring semester.
by RN
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