Chaucer – Swifterature

I had been looking forward to teaching this class for months. In some ways, it's the class that started it all: my concrete idea for English Literature (Taylor's Version) took shape when listening to 'The Great War' for the first time back in 2022, and noticing parallels with Sylvia Plath's poem 'Daddy' (you can read more about that here). It eventually grew into something bigger: a seminar that paired trauma studies with discussion of art as therapy, the connections between literature, love and war, and close reading of Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, John Donne's 'Love's War' and, of course, Plath's 'Daddy'. We also discussed Holocaust literature, the disturbing trend for '...of Auschwitz' titles in modern publishing, and what it means to use art to talk about trauma. It was, perhaps, the most meaningful seminar of all those I've taught, and sparked perhaps the most important conversations. [Click above image to read more]

‘Too many young women yearn for annihilation’, reads the clickbaity subtitle of Mary Harrington’s article ‘The Dark Truth about Taylor Swift’. Published on 16 August 2023, Harrington’s piece observes a troubling tendency in young women towards ‘a craving for romantic transcendence that’s difficult to distinguish from self-destruction’: in other words, an obsession with, and yearning for, love affairs made all the more intense by the knowledge that they are doomed to failure (such as Jack and Rose from Titanic, or Romeo and Juliet). Harrington attributes some of Swift’s popularity to the fact that her oeuvre satisfies this desire: her best songs are about romantic liaisons that don’t end well (‘got a history of stories ending sadly’). Harrington then goes on to link this to thirteenth-century France and the massacre of the Cathar sect of Christianity, who saw our incarnated world as fundamentally evil and longed to escape the ‘prison’ of flesh to return to unity with God. Following their persecution during the Albigensian Crusade, the Cathars’ beliefs went underground and spawned what we now know as ‘courtly love’ literature.