BELGIAN UNIVERSITY NOW OFFERING TAYLOR SWIFT COURSE

Ghent University in Belgium has announced that it will start offering a course “Literature: Taylor’s Version” in the fall.

The name of the course is a nod to Taylor Swift’s albums that she re-recorded.

The course has been curated by assistant professor Elly McCausland, author of the blog “Swiftarture” and will focus on Swift’s work to engage with literature “from the Medieval period to the Victorian”. This includes works by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte and Margaret Atwood.

The class syllabus explains that it will use the artist’s work as a start and cover several topics:

“Highly prolific and autobiographical in her songwriting, Swift makes frequent allusions to canonical literary texts in her music. Using Swift’s work as a springboard, we will explore, among other topics, literary feminism, ecocriticism, fan studies, and tropes such as the anti-hero. Swift’s enduring popularity stems, at least in part, from the heavily intertextual aspect of her work, and this course will dig deeper to explore its literary roots.”

The syllabus continues to invite everyone to enrol, not only Swifties.

Registration “is open to all, including those who do not consider themselves fans of Taylor Swift (or may never have encountered her music).

Image credit: Rolling Stone