By Emma Weidmann | Arts and Life Editor
Welcome to Waco — it’s been waiting for a Taylor Swift class.
In fall 2024, Dr. Sebastian Langdell and Dr. Ginger Hanchey — both medievalists, both Swifties — will teach “Lit (Taylor’s Version),” a course that promises to put the music of the generation’s biggest pop star into context with literary greats such as William Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde.
The new listing is part of a wider revamping of the English major that includes 40 new courses and a “more relevant and flexible” approach to literature that opens the study to all.
It makes Baylor just one more university in a long line of others that have implemented a similar course. The first iteration, “The Taylor Swift Songbook,” began at New York University in 2022, and the trend has caught on like wildfire.
If you were wondering, Langdell’s personal favorite song of Swift’s is “the 1,” and Hanchey’s is “This Love.”
Langdell said the parallels between Swift and iconic poets of the past are numerous and can be pretty on-the-nose, such as her reference to Wordsworth by name in “the lakes,” the “Romeo and Juliet” theme of “Love Story” and the Gatsby name-drop in “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.”
“There are the more overt allusions or references, such as to Wordsworth and Shakespeare and [F. Scott] Fitzgerald and [Robert] Frost,” Langdell said. “And then there are also more thematic links or works that are corollary and that exist within a similar network of ideas and themes.”
Swift, at her core, is a bit bookish. She once said if she weren’t a pop star, she would be an English teacher, and she backs that up with an honorary Ph.D. in literature from NYU. Her upcoming album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” bears a striking resemblance in name to “The Dead Poets Society” as well.
However, Swift isn’t alone in her particular interest in aligning herself with the literary community. Artists like Hozier make references to the literary canon, and by doing so, they craft a public image of being a serious, tortured artist.
The course, which is shaping up to rely in part on class discussion, will include conversations on Swift’s artistic persona as compared to the Swift photographed by the paparazzi in designer clothes with her NFL star boyfriend, Travis Kelce.
Is the strategic businesswoman Swift at odds with the tortured artist Swift?
“That’s exactly the kind of discussion that we’re going to be having in the class, is who are these different Taylors?” Langdell said. “But it’s not just unique to her either, right? If you think about someone like Oscar Wilde [or] Lord Byron, so much is about the construction of a public persona. … And I think it’s worthwhile to consider that side of the discussion too.”
When introducing a course like this one, it naturally begs the question, why Taylor Swift? Hanchey said Swift’s ability to craft metaphors is something that sets her apart from the crowd, but it’s also the validity she lends to her female audience who may have been told their feelings were frivolous or dramatic.
Swift makes being a dramatic, silly girl something seriously artistic and worth paying attention to. That’s the kind of thing that sells — and fills seats.
“I think that’s part of what we’re going to do with the gender conversation too,” Hanchey said. “There’s a lot of sexuality in the kinds of things she thinks and talks about, so when we think about how does gender and society’s view of gender affect our view of art, there’s some really interesting conversations to be had there.”
Swift depicts a progression in how women’s experiences are represented in the arts. Hanchey said women in literature were discounted until the very recent past.
“There was a time not so long ago, when females became able to write poetry that people would listen to,” Hanchey said. “You could talk about being a nursing mother in a poem, and that was a good thing, and that wasn’t that long ago that you could really talk about the female experience in a poem.”
Students who take the course will analyze Swift’s lyrical themes alongside short stories and poems by authors such as Virginia Woolf, Rita Dove, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Sally Rooney, E.E. Cummings and others. Make no mistake — this is a literature class like any other, and it revolves around the poetry of Swift’s discography rather than her personal life and drama as portrayed in the media.
The new album will be a “foundational text” during the semester, and students will “read” the album as a literary work and come up with a collective analysis, according to Langdell and Hanchey. This is one way the professors see the class as a way of interacting with and “reaching back” to Baylor’s campus. As Taylor signals her alignment with literature in her album title, she also becomes an accessible source of literature.
It’s not out of the ordinary to treat musicians as poets. In 2016, Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize for poetry. The point, Hanchey said, is to bring a wider understanding to the meaning of art, one that includes pop music.
“I think we’re putting [Swift] in the context of art generally,” Hanchey said “What is art doing? What is something that’s really good, but that we wouldn’t call art? And what is art? I think that’s a really interesting question to talk about.”
As a medievalist, Hanchey said medieval literature had always met people where they were and wasn’t always so serious, though it appears that way to us in the modern age. The great literary figures who now appear to us as mighty giants of prose and fiction were once people who wrote using common language about common things.
“I also think with art, we come with ideas in our head about what an artist is supposed to be,” Hanchey said. “We think they’re going to be serious and heavy, but look at Chaucer. One of the reasons we love him is that he can talk about anything, and it can be really funny. It could be potty humor. It could be body humor. And we understand it and laugh hundreds of years later. And Wordsworth is talking about simple things; that was his whole thing, was getting back to the basics, to ideas about childhood and nature. And I think we put too much on what our ideas of certain figures should be, because really what art can do is resonate with the very most basic human experiences that we have.”
Ultimately, that’s what Swift does. She talks about how to deal with mean people. She laments breakups and bad friends and hard times. And sometimes she just shakes it off.
ENG 4360 is open this fall to all majors, though its cross-listing, CRW 3310, prioritizes English majors and minors and Creative Writing minors.
“Our goal is to open the world of literature to everyone,” Hanchey said. “We find it so meaningful and fun. We want everyone to get to know it this way.”
