I Don’t Like Your Kingdom Keys: Literature, Gatekeeping, and the Classroom as Kindergarten

Well, this escalated. One minute I’m typing idle thoughts into a sticky note on my laptop about all the ways in which we might connect Taylor Swift songs with literature (and positing frivolous titles for such a course, like ‘Now I’ve Read All of the Books Beside Your Bed’); the next, I’m setting alarms for 3.30, 4.30, 5.30 and 7.00am so I can talk about this initiative to Dubai, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the US and Ireland, or rushing around trying to find a quiet corner in the middle of an American university campus where I can chat live to BBC News. Following segments on the Ukraine war and the Iran hijab protests with my chirpy musings on Swift (not Jonathan) and literature is one of the more surreal things I’ve done in my career. I’ve nearly emptied a tube of concealer after all the work I’ve had to do on my under-eye bags for Zoom interviews at 4am. I may look professional from the neck up, but rest assured I’ve been sitting there in my leopard print pyjamas.

I’m surprised but delighted by the interest this has garnered from all over the world. I am fascinated to learn how my name looks translated into Serbian. I am bemused by journalists asking what job opportunities this course could possibly lead to. I am thrilled by the Swiftie memes and iconography it has started to spawn. I love the myriad emails and instagram DMs I’m receiving from students inspired by the possibility of combining their passions with their studies. 

There’s one thing I want to talk about even more than I want to talk about ‘The Great War’ and Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’, though – and that’s gatekeeping.

Not everyone is thrilled by the inclusion of Taylor Swift in Ghent University’s educational offerings. There has been a snarky newspaper column (in Dutch) that ended with the solemn declaration, ‘het is een aula, geen kleutertuin’ – which translates as ‘It’s an auditorium, not a kindergarten’. Perhaps someone needs to show this man – of course it’s a man – the excellent Spotify playlist entitled ‘Taylor Swift’s aDuLt SoNgS lol’ – I definitely don’t think they’re playing So It Goes or Dress in kindergartens. I’ve had actual hate mail, telling me to ‘Go back to Brexit land’ (shoutout to you Belgium, thanks for taking me in – and surely it’s only a matter of time before ‘Brexit land’ exists as a theme park dreamed up by Nigel Farage). There have been a few derisive tweets tagging me – my response is to quote Taylor at them until they desist, and it’s proving an amazingly effective strategy. At one point it was implied that I am a perpetrator of colonialism for teaching English literature in…English. 

I’ve been asked multiple times what I think of all this, so let me reiterate here what I’ve said to the journalists: I couldn’t be more pleased. In fact, I’ve saved a selection of screenshots of my favourite such messages, and we’ll be using them in the first seminar of English Literature (Taylor’s Version). Why? Because this response only proves the need for such a course to exist.

My best friend suggested that I have created the ‘David Beckham Studies’ of my generation, referencing a much-derided course offered by the University of Staffordshire (UK) in 2008. This got me thinking. 2008 would have seen me – nineteen years old, sporting ridiculous pink hair, still high on the thrill of getting a place at Oxford University to study English Literature – rhapsodising lyrically and scornfully to anyone who would listen about the travesty that was David Beckham Studies. I would probably have used the phrase ‘Mickey Mouse Degree’. I would inevitably have sounded like an insufferable snob to anyone listening who wasn’t also full of socially conditioned ideas about success being synonymous with having gained a place to study amidst the Dreaming Spires. I would have implied that this course was a sign of a downfall in our educational competencies as a nation, and that anyone who took such a course must be a bit dim, looking for a ‘soft option’. In short, I would have been an uppity little idiot. Taylor says, ‘when you are young they assume you know nothing’, but this assumption would probably have been quite fair when applied to nineteen-year-old me. 

It’s funny, then, to see myself on the other side of this, now at the receiving end of such critique. In the fifteen years since those pink-haired days, I’ve spent a lot of time in educational institutions, as both student and teacher. I’ve gained two degrees and a PhD. I’ve taught children and adults from all over the world. I’ve shown pre-teens from Austria how to ‘properly’ eat scones (jam first obvs) as part of a lesson on English culture for a TEFL course. I’ve helped 12 year-olds write crime novels inexplicably featuring butternut squash as the culprit. I’ve participated in workshops where we get students to rap the fantastically crude line from Othello, ‘an old black ram is tupping your white ewe’. 

I’ve spent most of my career teaching students whose native language is not English. I’ve seen eyes glaze over at long, difficult texts in archaic Shakespearean or Middle English whose relevance to the twenty-first century seems non-existent, and, in response to the question, ‘Why should we care about these texts?’ have often witnessed blank faces. 

With all this in mind, I have spent the past twelve years trying to instil in students the same passion that I have felt for English literature since my late teens. Rather than try a top-down approach, lecturing at the students as to why this is important, I have always tried to cultivate the critical thinking, via my lectures and seminars, that will allow students to see this importance for themselves. What matters most to me is that students come away from class excited by literature: its potential to capture a moment, a feeling, or even – in the case of, for example, the Victorian three-volume novel – the entirety of the human condition. What matters to me is that it becomes meaningful to them in some way; that it can weave itself into their daily lives. 

There seems to be an objection to the latest methods I am using to cultivate this critical thinking. What apparently offends most is the association of Taylor Swift, one of the most accessible and popular media stars in the world, with the behemoth that is ‘ENGLISH LITERATURE’ (imagine this written in swooping, sloping cursive letters on parchment by a quill). To permit Swift access to the closed community of Canonical Authors is apparently a travesty, since this space is of course reserved only for the Literary Greats of past ages: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, Dickens. How dare a girlish, American, playful, provocative and intensely self-aware female artist be allowed to sully such a sanctified arena?

This is what we call gatekeeping: those in positions of power deliberately restricting access, by the masses, to certain material, and whose restrictive motives are often rooted in sexism, racism or classism. Gatekeepers decide which voices are heard and what themes and issues deserve attention. In a literary context, gatekeeping is practised at an institutional level by publishers, university professors, awarding institutions (such as the Booker prize) and bookstores, whose framing of English literature via what is and is not published, via syllabi, booklists, awards or store displays, contributes to and consolidates a certain conception of what is ‘literary’ and what is not. Gatekeeping is closely linked to the notion of what we call canonicity or ‘the canon’, whereby a selection of texts, through repeated publication in new editions, teaching and citation acquire an almost mythical, enshrined status (again, think Shakespeare, Dickens, Chaucer, et cetera). 

Although the idea of the canon is hotly debated and contested by literary scholars, it seems to maintain a pervasive hold over the popular imagination. I find it particularly interesting that much of the derision in response to English Literature (Taylor’s Version) comes not from the scholarly community, but from those outside academia. This perhaps shouldn’t surprise me: after all, I work predominantly in the field of children’s literature, and my esteemed colleagues in this field know, perhaps better than anyone, that literary study can, and perhaps should, be a playful space. The study of literature is always looking to broaden itself, to ask big questions, to encourage thinking outside the box, including the box of what exactly literature is, and does. Literature professors know better than anyone that we can read almost anything as a ‘text’, open for debate, analysis and discussion, particularly in tandem with other texts. Far from cosseting ourselves at the top of it, we in fact long to banish The Ivory Tower: to let down our metaphorical hair, like Rapunzel, and set debate and discussion free amongst anyone who wishes to participate. Unfortunately, it seems there are those who would maintain its cloistered walls. 

If I can get students excited by medieval poetry written in (almost) another language, because they can trace its connections to Swift’s songs about white horses and knights in shining armour, and see how the institution of chivalry has been fraught with anxiety and faultlines even since its very inception and social consolidation, I consider my work well done. If I can introduce students to texts they might not otherwise pick up and tackle, like the capacious ‘triple decker’ novels of the nineteenth century, because they want to see where Swift’s idea of the ‘anti hero’ came from, and how unlikeable female protagonists have a strong literary genealogy entwined with early feminism, then my career takes on an importance that goes far beyond how many funding grants I’ve acquired. If I can show students that Romanticism is not all chattering about daffodils, but could have real impact in terms of cultivating an empathy and sense of interconnection that might, in however small a way, have meaningful impact on our climate crisis, then that matters more to me than any amount of academic publications that only a handful of scholars will read. (It should be noted, though, that I can also put on my serious professor hat and produce those publications, and that they have their place, too). 

I’ve had several emotional emails from young scholars and students thanking me for validating their academic interest in Swift, where others have scoffed. I’ve had messages from those beyond the academic community – graduates, doctors, those who studied subjects far removed from the Humanities – expressing their renewed interest in returning to academia or venturing, for the first time, into the field of literary study. Yet it seems, sadly, that some people out there are scrabbling frantically to close that gate before they get in. Don’t worry, though – I’ll keep my foot in the door, and I’ll take a goddamn angle grinder to the lock if necessary. 

Are Taylor Swift songs literature? There is no definitive answer to that question. And that, Dear Reader, is precisely the point: let’s discuss, debate, disagree. Let’s throw open the gates, let discourse flood in, and revel in the intertextuality of culture. Let’s push the boundaries of what is and is not ‘worthy’ of study, because ultimately, cultivating attention to our everyday is one way of maintaining wide-eyed wonder in this absolutely chaotic world in which we live. 

The study of literature should take place not in an ivory tower, but in a safe space in which students can play, express themselves, push boundaries, experiment and, most of all, enjoy. I’m delighted to bring a little more of that kindergarten spirit to my auditorium. Or, as Swift would say: don’t you ever grow up.