New Taylor Swift songwriting literature course coming to Texas University

The new course is titled The Taylor Swift Songbook, and will use "the songwriting of pop music icon Taylor Swift to introduce literary critical reading and research methods-basic skills for work in English literature and other humanities disciplines."

Her songs will be read alongside works by Geoffrey Chaucer, Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats and more.

Sky News reports that the UTA site description for the course adds, "Focusing on Swift's music and the cultural contexts in which it and her career are situated, we'll consider frameworks for understanding her work, such as poetic form, style, and history among various matters and theoretical issues important to contextualisation as we practice close and in-depth reading, evaluating secondary sources, and building strong arguments."

Preliminary texts for The Taylor Swift Songbook include her Folklore and Evermore albums, as well as Red (Taylor's Version) and Lover.

The new university course is the second in 2022 to use Swift as the subject, following New York University’s Clive Davis Institute, which ran a course about Swift being a "creative music entrepreneur" and the "legacy of pop and country songwriters that have influenced Swift".