Why an English literature professor is teaching a course on Taylor Swift

16:12What students gain from bringing pop culture into the classroom

If you think Taylor Swift's lyrics should qualify as poetry worthy of study, you're not alone.

A new course offered at Belgium's Ghent University, titled "Literature (Taylor's Version)," plans to look at English literature via the lens of Swift's music.

It's not the only course of its kind. Classes focussing on pop culture have grown in popularity in recent years, but what do students take away from close study of these modern icons?

British professor Elly McCausland is the instructor behind Ghent's new Swift-centric course. Hip-hop historian Dalton Higgins has also taught a Drake-themed course at Toronto Metropolitan University for years. They join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to talk about the value of bringing pop culture into the classroom.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: How did Taylor Swift's The Great War inspire you to create the course "Literature (Taylor's Version)"?

Elly: I was listening to The Great War, and I was thinking about the way she uses the iconography of the First World War as a metaphor for a troubled relationship or the early stages where you're a bit anxious. I felt kind of weird about it, and I thought there was a moral question here: is it OK to sort of appropriate the suffering of First World War soldiers to articulate your own relationship issues? And then I thought about the last time I had those feelings, which is when I read Sylvia Plath's poem Daddy. Plath uses the Holocaust as a metaphor for the pain she has regarding her troubled relationship with a father who passed away when she was young. And so, I wanted a bigger platform to talk about this, and that's when I thought, let's bring this into the classroom and get a discussion going.

Elamin: I'm so glad that you did that. You also run a blog called Swifterature, which is not an easy word to say, I should say. You dig into a lot of these literary connections.… Can you elaborate on that a bit?

Elly: Yeah, absolutely. I think it all comes down to what we call intertextuality — when you have texts that refer to one another, [but] not necessarily directly. I would say Swift makes a lot of direct allusions to English literature in her work…. For example, in This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, she says, "feeling so Gatsby for that whole year" — she's obviously talking about The Great Gatsby, right? But not just the direct allusions. I think there's a sort of intertextual quality to her work where she is playing around with genre, with metaphors, with trope, with cliché in a way that is intensely literary — in a way that writers have been doing for centuries. I think it's just the way in which she invokes this kind of complicated mess of literature, both British and American, that gives it an appeal even if you don't directly recognize the allusions or the techniques, because there's a sort of sense of this drawing on something bigger. I suspect that is what makes her work so popular: the way it's kind of embedded itself within this cultural literary landscape.

WATCH | Taylor Swift performs This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things:

Elamin: My grander theory about Taylor's popularity has been that she's also turned her life into a text in very much a similar way, right?

Elly: Absolutely, her self-fashioning and the way in which her work is very meta and very self-conscious of her own status as author, as writer, as singer.… In English literature we often look at the artist alongside the work and we try to make connections between the two in order to elucidate the work to a greater extent — and that's what a lot of Swifties are doing.

Elamin: I've long felt that if Swifties could dedicate the same energy that they take into decoding what Taylor is talking about into, I don't know, solving unsolved crimes? I think we'd have a lot more success in terms of solving those things. Dalton, the course that you teach at Toronto Metropolitan University is on Drake and The Weeknd. You're using a similar model with these big pop culture figures that everyone knows as gateways into more complex ideas. But your focus is a bit different. What's your aim with your course?

Dalton: There are a lot of similarities to what Elly is doing. Rappers are just incredible writers, right? So what we try to do in my course is get students to think beyond the music, and to start to think critically about their favourite musicians…. I think it can be sometimes challenging for students to look at their pop culture heroes critically. I've been teaching this course [for three years], and sometimes I'll have some Drake superfans; they believe he can do no wrong. But we're here to think critically about his artistic output.

WATCH | Official music video for Drake's Started From The Bottom:

So with my course, I try to get students to look at Drake, for example, through a racial and faith-based lens, because Drake is Black and he's Jewish. What are the implications? … For me, it's very issues-oriented. We talk about class issues. People position Drake as a sort of middle class rapper in a hip-hop community and society where we talk about its low income origins — the dispossessed, marginalized communities. That's not Drake's narrative; that was never his trajectory, right? So that's what I try to do in my class.

Elamin: Elly, when your course was announced, a lot of people were kind of critical of the idea that Taylor Swift deserves all of this. Can you talk a little bit about the response that you've received?

Elly: I want to say, what Dalton said about critical thinking and not being there to be a fan club, that's exactly what I want to do as well. I made it very clear even in the course description that we are here to think critically about her as we would any other writer. So the response, I mean, I have had some skepticism. There've been a few people who have said, "All she does is write about boys and breakups." And I'm kind of like, well, that's half the literary canon.

Elamin: That's all of literature.

Elly: Exactly. If you take heartbreak and love out of the equation, you're not left with much. The response, I'd say, generally has been really positive, though.… I want to make us rethink the way we see popular culture. It is worthy of study. It is something that we can think critically about. In fact, I would say we should think critically about it, because this is the world we live in. We need to understand the zeitgeist. We need to understand what is popular…. But those that have expressed negative opinions, a lot of it seems to be rooted in misogyny. A lot of it seems to be rooted in a kind of hatred of Taylor Swift and what she stands for — and to be honest, I find it fascinating. It's going to be material for our first seminar: why Taylor Swift attracts this kind of intense reaction. It's all coming really nicely together and I'm generally really thrilled by how people have responded to it. Very surprised, but delighted.

Elamin: Elly, let me just ask you this: if a university introduced a course about Bob Dylan or The Beatles, no one would bat an eye, but a Taylor Swift course still raises those eyebrows. What does that tell you about who we canonize in culture?

Elly: I think it tells you that feminism has a lot more work to do and we have a long way to go. I suspect some of it is rooted in misogyny. I think some of it is also rooted, though, in a fear of the new, because obviously The Beatles and Bob Dylan are not new these days…. We've always been skeptical about what is new and what is popular, and that's actually, I think, the reason we should look at why we're skeptical. Why are we so afraid of the new? Why are we so afraid of something that is a worldwide global sensation? Because I think there's a lot of this, whether it's Taylor, whether it's video game courses or media studies, there's always a kind of snobbery there about what is new. And that's something I'm hoping to change.

Elamin: I'm going to sneakily get into both of your classes because they both sound so fascinating.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.