From “Alice in Wonderland” to “The Great Gatsby”, “Rebecca” to “Jane Eyre”, the songs of singer-songwriter Taylor Swift are filled with clear and subtle literary references.
Now, a literature professor in Belgium is using Swift’s literary allusions to introduce students to the great writers of English literature and the themes that underlie their works.
Swift’s songs, according to Elly McCausland, an assistant professor at Ghent University, provide a chance to examine feminism through songs like “The Man” and the anti-hero stereotype through the aptly called song “Anti-Hero” from her album “Midnights” from 2022.
McCausland listened to “The Great War,” also from “Midnights,” earlier this year and made the decision to organize a course that will begin in September that is influenced by Swift’s writing.
“The way she uses the war, like a metaphor for a relationship, made me a bit uncomfortable and it got me thinking about Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’, which does a similar thing and also it’s very uncomfortable reading,” the academic told AFP.
The scholar emphasized that other singers and forms of media, like Beyonce or even the video-sharing website TikTok, might be utilized for the same purpose.
Swift’s lyrics are used in McCausland’s course as a springboard into the works of some of the greatest authors in literature history, including William Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Thackeray.
Swift makes reference to the writings of a number of other authors, such as Charles Dickens and Emily Dickinson, and McCausland saw similarities between Swift’s style and those of other authors, such as the British Romantic poets of the early 19th century.
In the songs “Wonderland” and “long story short”, Swift mentions going down a “rabbit hole”, a reference to Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”.
In a 2020 conversation with Paul McCartney published by Rolling Stone during the Covid-19 pandemic, the songwriter described her love of words and how she was “reading so much more than I ever did” including Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca”.
McCausland has received requests from people outside the university, even through private Instagram messaging, to enroll in the course since it is so well-liked.
The value of utilizing Swift’s work in higher education has been questioned online due to snobbery and criticism. McCausland drew comparisons to the skepticism that Bob Dylan encountered following his 2016 Nobel Prize in literature.
