Taylor Swift’s Songwriting Becomes Course At Texas University

Taylor Swift has been in the music industry since she was a teenager. Swift has a huge fan base, and those Swifties are always looking forward to learn new things about her. Some college students in the Lone Star State have a new literature course available to them that will focus on Taylor Swift’s songwriting.

The 11-time Grammy Award winner’s method for writing songs is the focus of a new songwriting course being offered to students at the University of Texas at Austin. According to Page Six, the course will be taught by Dr. Elizabeth Scala, an English professor, beginning this autumn and titled “Literary Contests and Contexts: The Taylor Swift Songbook.”

Dr. Elizabeth Scala claimed that in November, just after the publication of “Red (Taylor’s Version),” that her daughter introduced her to Swift’s music. Scala told the Austin American-Statesman about Swift’s intelligent songwriting. The professor aims to take what Swift fans already do to a sophisticated level.

Swift is an intelligent and talented songwriter, and her writing skills are what made me focus on her. I want to take what Swift fans can already do at a sophisticated level, tease it out for them a bit with a different vocabulary, and then show them how, in fact, Swift draws on richer literary traditions in her songwriting. I’ll be showing students that these operations and interpretive moves one makes when reading her songs are appropriate to all forms of writing.

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The university’s website states that the course will use “the songwriting of pop music icon Taylor Swift to introduce literary critical reading and research methods-basic skills for work in English literature and other humanities disciplines. Focusing on Swift’s music and the cultural contexts in which it and her career are situated, we’ll consider frameworks for understanding her work, such as poetic form, style, and history among various matters and theoretical issues important to contextualization as we practice close and in-depth reading, evaluating secondary sources, and building strong arguments.”

The first institution to develop a course in Swift’s honor was New York University. However, their course discusses the singer as a music entrepreneur and concentrates on the songwriters who influenced her work. Swift was also awarded an honorary doctorate in fine arts by NYU earlier this year. Stay tuned to Thirsty for more news and updates.

What’s your take on this course introduction? Sound it in the comments.