Belgium: The songs of American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift are going to be study material at a Belgian university. A literature professor in Belgium is using Taylor Swift’s songs as the basis for a course that explores classic English literature and its themes, highlighting the bookish qualities of Swift’s lyrics.
“I’ve never had so many emails from excited students asking if they can take the course, and actually non-students as well, people who are not part of the university and who want to participate in some way,” said McCausland, an assistant professor at the Belgian university.
McCausland proposed a unique elective focused on Taylor Swift, possibly the first of its kind in Europe. The professor was inspired to do so because she noticed strong parallels between Swift’s lyrics and the English literature she had been studying for a long time.
The course is titled Literature: Taylor’s Version. In Swift’s song “The Great War,” the professor noticed similarities with how Sylvia Plath vividly depicted the horrors of war and pain in her poem “Daddy.” Additionally, Swift’s song “Mad Woman” and its exploration of patriarchy and mental health reminded her of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The professor wondered why this connection hadn’t been discussed more.
McCausland was planning earlier this year to start a course in September 2023, inspired by Swift’s work after listening to “The Great War”, also from her “Midnights” album.
“What I want to do is show students that although these texts might seem inaccessible, they can be accessible if we look at them from a slightly different angle. So, Shakespeare, in some way, is actually addressing a lot of the same questions as Taylor Swift is today, which seems crazy. But he is,” McCausland said.
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