Professor explains why Taylor Swift university course is no waste of money: ‘She’s the man’

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A professor teaching a Taylor Swift university course says the class is absolutely not a waste of money.

The University of Texas’ professor Elizabeth Scala is teaching an all-new Taylor Swift literature module called “Taylor Swift’s songbook”

She tells PinkNews that she got the idea for the course when her daughter came to live at home during the pandemic and began playing Taylor Swift on repeat around the house. 

“I started listening to the words of ‘All Too Well’, and I listened to it all too much,” she jokes.

“I thought about the way it’s constructed, the difference between the five-minute version and the 10-minute version, about its relationship to her life, and its relationship to her other songs.”

Sixteen lucky students filled the blank space on the course and will spend the term analysing and unpicking Taylor Swift’s discography. 

Scala is keen to emphasise the literary angle of the course, as the work will be compared and contrasted to other poetry, read for its structure and metre and placed in the modern literary (texts) corpus.

Considering Swift’s track record of referencing great writers such as Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway, William Wordsworth and Robert Frost, there will be a wealth to pull from.

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when i say i love poetry i mainly mean that i love folklore and evermore by taylor swift

— darina