English Literature (Taylor’s Version): Seminar 7

by Kristel Tole; this seminar was led by Zoe van Cauwenberg

In seminar 7, we started out with an analysis of three songs from Taylor Swift’s repertoire:

Mastermind
Nothing New
Castles Crumbling

My group talked about ‘Mastermind’ and we answered these three questions:

How do these songs engage with questions of fame, legacy and reputation?

Taylor in her song ‘Mastermind’ shows the desire she has for wanting to be with the person that she loves. She tries hard to get with this person showing no fear of what the public thinks. She doesn’t question her fame or her reputation because she is in love and wants to be with her lover. She challenges the societal norms of what a woman should be in a relationship, not to be a pawn but a fighter. It is this force that drives her to not give up.

How do these songs construe/present the relationship to an implied audience (e.g. ‘you’ in Mastermind)?

You in ‘Mastermind’ is used to address her lover. Here we see a relationship at first sight one-sided because we are only aware of Taylor’s feelings. But at the same time, you is used to address the public as a way of telling what happened, what did she do to get the man she loved, what ‘grand scheme’ she chose.

How would you characterise the lyrical I?

The lyrical I is used for the listener to imagine the speaker and its actions. It gives the listeners a sort of shift between what is written and what it is imagined. In the song, the listener can imagine the first time Taylor saw her lover and how she was planning and everything that was going in between by the information she herself gave through the lyrical I.

Death of an author

Second, we discussed the concept of authorship in literary theory, drawing on Roland Barthes’ essay ‘The Death of the Author’ and Michel Foucault’s ideas in ‘What is an Author?’

Barthes suggests that assigning an author to a text limits its interpretation and meaning, while Foucault explores the relationship between the author, the text, and the reader.
The author is viewed as an ‘ideological product’ shaped by the audience, as per Michel Foucault’s perspective.
The intersection of feminism with the ideas of Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault raises questions about the significance of the author’s gender, leading feminists to reconsider whether the gender of the author truly matters when analysing women writers.
There is a need for the author to be metaphorically ‘dead and buried’ before a critical re-evaluation can occur. Early women writers are still singled out in scholarship and classrooms primarily for political, rather than aesthetic, reasons—specifically, their gender or being the ‘first’ woman to achieve certain literary milestones. That is why for women authors a critical re-evaluation is difficult to achieve.

Gendering Digital Bibliography

Third, we focused on women’s contributions to print during the long eighteenth century.

Digital bibliography – converts enumerative and descriptive bibliography into a format that makes data and book production networks visible, accessible, meaningful, and reusable.
Female digital bibliography aligns with the power a bibliography has to restore feminism.
Digital bibliography can address questions of identity that traditional bibliographic and book history methods often overlook or neglect.
The signed author vs the personal record discusses names as a ‘reduction of lived existence’ and the publicisation of identity through naming, including considerations of anonymity through phrases like ‘by a lady’, the use of initials, and pseudonyms.

Marketing the female author

We touched upon examples of prefaces of female authors such as: Sappho and Phaon, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Turner Smith, etc.

A discussion about why Jane Austen and not other female authors

Austen’s unique narrative voice, keen observations of social manners, and her ability to create memorable characters gained her longevity and popularity. Austen’s novels, such as Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma, are celebrated for their wit, humor, and insightful commentary on the social and cultural norms of her time. She used themes that are still quite present even to this day which contributes to her legacy. But at the same time, we shouldn’t discredit other females authors who have given their contribution to the literary world.

Nothing New?

The Minerva Press, active from the 1790s to the 1820s, was characterised as a ‘factory for cheap, formulaic novels.’ These novels were marketed as gothic, sensationalist, and sentimental, contributing to the press’s reputation as a female-oriented publishing house.

Moving forward?

(Re)turn to aesthetics and formalist criticism – Emphasis on close textual and formal analysis, considering gender to address challenges in integrating women’s writing into the larger literary field
Archipelagic feminist recovery – Aims to reassess the status of particular poets and the significance of their works, challenging the conventional ‘canon’ of women’s literary production
Feminist digital bibliography and book historical approaches – Focus on making women visible in the production process.
Inclusion of manuscripts, periodical press, commonplace books, and epistolary exchanges in the study of women’s literary contributions.

See the creative work students produced in response to this seminar here.