You can find countless articles online – and a few books by now, too – listing all the literary allusions in Taylor Swift’s work, many of which I've also documented on this blog. Beyond suggesting that Swift is familiar with some English literary classics, though, these lists don’t really tell us much at all. When… Continue reading Swifterature: the book. Coming 4 November
Tag: English Literature (Taylor’s Version)
What’s it like to study English Literature (Taylor’s Version)?
For an answer to that question, please enjoy this incredible graphic novel by two of my ridiculously talented students! Thank you Chiara and Anaya. Click above image to read more!
English Literature (Taylor’s Version): Seminar 9
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]
English Literature (Taylor’s Version): Seminar 3
[By Birgit de Schrijver] In the third seminar we looked at the role of the author. More specifically the influence of the author when it comes to our interpretation of certain texts (or songs). When looking at “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll, we came across many nonsense words which made it difficult to understand the poem. However, this gave us a lot of freedom in interpreting it since there didn’t seem to be a right or wrong meaning. Where Jabberwocky gave us a lot of freedom, part of this was taken away by Carroll's “Through the Looking Glass”. Here, Humpty Dumpty gives us (sometimes confusing) explanations for the nonsense words. Unfortunately, by telling us what something means, we are deprived of our own interpretation. We discussed that often the explicit interpretation of the author limits the interpretation of the reader. [Click above image to read more]
English Literature (Taylor’s Version): Seminar 2
In English Literature (Taylor's Version) seminar 2 - titled 'This Ain't a Fairytale: Chivalry and the Knight in Shining Armour' - we looked at the anonymous 14th century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written in Middle English (though we used the excellent Simon Armitage poetic translation). Students had also watched the 2021 film The Green Knight - a very free adaptation of the poem by filmmaker David Lowery and starring Dev Patel - in advance of the seminar, and were asked to write either a short opinion piece on the film, or their thoughts on the idea of chivalry. [Click the above image to read more]
English Literature (Taylor’s Version): Seminar 1
In the first seminar of English Literature (Taylor's Version) at Ghent University, we looked at four reasons to study Taylor Swift's work alongside English literature. [Click the image above to read more.]
Swifterature 