Should Harvard offer courses on Taylor Swift? Of course it should. Everyone is talking about a course at Harvard titled “Taylor Swift and Her World.” Here is some context from Stephanie Burt, the English professor who will be teaching the course:
Last month, Harvard announced that I would be teaching a class next semester called “Taylor Swift and Her World,” an open-enrollment lecture partly about Swift’s work and career and partly about literature (poems, novels, memoirs) that overlaps with, or speaks to, that work. When the news came out, my inbox blew up with dozens of requests, from as far away as New Zealand. Reporters wanted to know whether Swift would visit the course (not expecting her to), whether her online superfans were involved (some will be), whether Harvard approved (yes, at least so far), and, above all, why a Millennial pop star deserves this kind of treatment at a world-class university.
In some ways, the answer is simple. If the humanities ought to study culture, including the culture of the present day, and Taylor Swift is all over that culture, then of course we should ask why and how the Swift phenomenon came to be. That’s what a cultural historian of the future would do, looking back at how Americans embraced Swift as an artist, debated her rise, and changed their perceptions of her over time. It’s also what a cultural anthropologist would do, decoding the rituals around Swift’s concerts and album drops, or finding cross-cultural patterns in the way that her fans respond to her voice and her work.
I’m a literary critic, though. I write and teach, most often, about how individual works of art and artists function: how the parts of a piece of literature fit together, how they sound, what they say, and what they do for us when we read, hear, or see them. Does Taylor Swift really merit that kind of attention?
Popular culture is a wonderful way of exploring culture and society. Messiah University is not Harvard, but for years the head of our library taught a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. Dana Polan taught a course on Frank Sinatra at NYU and Mathieu Deflem taught a course on Lady Gaga at the University of South Carolina. My dream is to one day teach a course on Bruce Springsteen–perhaps something along the lines of Anthony DeCurtis at Penn or Azzan Yadin-Israel at Rutgers or Kenneth Campbell at Monmouth University. Perhaps I will sing “Born to Run” in that course, not unlike Louis Masur did twenty years ago.
So why not Taylor Swift?
Here is more from Burt at The Atlantic:
I would not be teaching this course if I did not love Swift’s songs. But I would not be teaching this course, either, if I could not bring in other works of art, from other genres and time periods, that will help my students better understand Swift and her oeuvre. We will be reading two novels by Willa Cather about ambition, talent, and femininity in an earlier Middle America—novels about young women who want to become self-sustaining, recognized musicians, one who succeeds and one who fails. We will be reading James Weldon Johnson’s sharp-edged, irony-driven 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex–Colored Man, about a very different set of barriers for a young man who seeks musical success.
We will also look at three centuries of page-based poetry, meant to be read, not sung, on other topics central to Swift: childhood nostalgia and adulthood regret (William Wordsworth); girlhood, daughters, and heterosexual pessimism (Laura Kasischke); reactions to the haters and the low-down dirty cheats (Alexander Pope). I’ll take advantage, frankly, of a classroom full of Swifties to introduce hundreds of students to these poems. I will also help us attend to the way those poems describe being 15, or being 7, or being a constant target for unruly fans and resentful rivals in the streets of London—an experience that the Swift of her album Reputation shared with the Pope who wrote the great “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.”
People (like me) who think that college English courses should study works of art we take pleasure in will, I hope, be happy with these choices. So will people (like me) who think that college English courses should build analytical skills that can be applied in other contexts. As for the people (unlike me) who think that college English classes should focus on classics, on works that have stood the test of time (how much time? whose test? what kinds of works?), I hope they’ll end up happy with this course too. If you want, and I do, more undergraduates to read Pope and Wordsworth, Cather and Johnson, you might notice how many students will come for the Taylor and stay for the other writers involved.
The course, if it works, isn’t just a way to write about and listen to lots of Swift. It’s a way into centuries of literary creation in novels and memoirs, page-based verse, and prose. It’s a way, too, into literary and cultural reception: What do fans do with the work and the artists they admire? That said, it’s also a way through the work of one particular artist, one who has shown many of us her life, and even our own life, in her songs—an artist worthy of study, an artist so many of us already love.
Read the entire piece here.