The University of Texas at Austin offers to analyze his songs during a special class. The sixteen registered students will have to “analyze and contextualize common practices and problems of writing through the centuries”.
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Taylor Swift is one of the American pop superstars and the University of Texas at Austin offers to analyze her songs during a literature course.
With 200 million records sold, 11 Grammy Awards and already released 10 studio albums, at only 32 years old, the singer is a huge star in the United States. The artist grew up in the northeast of the United States but left at 14 years old to Nashville, the capital of country music. Since then, Taylor Swift has evolved into pop.
The superstar defines herself first as an author, writing most of her songs herself which, in the purest country style, tell stories. Taylor Swift describes the details of a romantic relationship very well, plays with words and captures attention in her lyrics while pairing them with melodies that won’t let you down.
It is such a phenomenon in the United States that its many fans have a name: the “Swifties”. The professor in charge of the course in Austin, Elizabeth Scala, is one of them. She discovered the singer thanks to her daughter during the pandemic and considers that she deserves attention on her work. But she assures him: this is not a course on celebrity. The sixteen registered students will have to “analyze and contextualize common practices and problems of writing through the centuries”.
This kind of course at an American university is not without precedent. In the spring, New York University offered a course on Taylor Swift, who, by the way, received an honorary degree from the university. The University of Texas at Austin has among its professors the Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey, proud Texan, himself an alumnus of the establishment. He gave courses on his films for several semesters. This same university had already taken an interest in black feminism through Beyoncé and Rihanna in 2015. In South Carolina, a sociology course focused on Lady Gaga. Next year at Texas State University, British popstar Harry Styles will be on the program for a course on “the cult of fame”.