[By Paulien Vercruysse] In seminar 6 of English Literature (Taylor’s Version), we focused on Romanticism, nature and ecocriticism, alongside Taylor Swift’s music. No less than five songs were on the agenda for this week and not one of them was unwelcome. The songs that we put under the microscope were ‘New Romantics’, ‘Out of the Woods’, ‘The Lakes’, ‘Ivy’ and ‘Willow’. The seminar was kicked off with a discussion of the songs. We tried to uncover what they were about, what role nature plays in them, and what striking images and oppositions we stumbled upon. [Click above image for more]
Month: November 2023
English Literature (Taylor’s Version): Seminar 5
In seminar 5, we explored the relationship between Swift's music ('Soon You'll Get Better'; 'Ronan'; 'Marjorie'; 'You're Losing Me'; 'Bigger Than the Whole Sky') and elegy, a capacious term that usually connotes a song or poem about death or bereavement, the tradition for which originated in ancient Greece. We looked at three very different examples of elegies: the anonymous 'The Wanderer', from the tenth century (originally written in Old English); Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' from the eighteenth century; and Christina Rossetti's 'A Dirge' (nineteenth century). Focusing on these poems, we explored the relationship between language, memory and emotion. Later, we asked what role elegy might play in twenty-first-century culture, and looked at some of the fan responses to Swift's elegies, speculating that these might help to remove some of the taboos surrounding grief, death and bereavement and enable people to articulate their emotions in a cathartic and restorative way. [Click above image for notes]
Title Pages (Taylor’s Version)
This is why we can have nice things; or, what happens when students are tasked with making an eighteenth-century-style title page for a Taylor Swift song. [Click above image to see more]
English Literature (Taylor’s Version): Seminar 4
In Seminar 4 of English Literature (Taylor's Version), we looked at the relationship between writing, gender and power, asking what Taylor Swift can teach us about literary feminism. We listened to 'Right Where You Left Me', 'Dear John', 'Mad Woman', 'Hits Different' and 'The Man', asking: What construction(s) of femininity do we see in the song? What is the relationship between writing and power? Are there any literary allusions? Is this a 'feminist' song? if so, why? If not, why not? We used this discussion - also bringing in Swift's re-recording of her masters, seen by many as a feminist act - to segue into two important feminist literary texts: Mary Wollstonecraft's 'Vindication of the Rights of Woman' (1792) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). [Click above image to read more]
Swifterature 