Taylor Swift evokes Belgium college course

A college is launching what’s believed to be the primary Taylor Swift-inspired literature course of its type in Europe.

The elective course on the University of Ghent in Belgium highlights the themes, types and strategies of well-known historic literary writers from the US pop famous person’s perspective, say stories.

The singer-songwriter’s songs are sometimes impressed by English literature classics and embody themes which additionally seem in Romeo and Juliet, Jane Eyre and Alice in Wonderland amongst others, in keeping with teachers.

For occasion, Swift‘s Love Story particulars a forbidden union between two younger lovers, a latter-day Romeo and Juliet.

And within the monitor Wonderland, Swift, 33, compares a relationship to the twists and turns within the Lewis Carroll story, together with the track’s lyrics “we fell down a rabbit hole”.

The course shall be taught by British professor Elly McCausland who will use Swift’s work as a springboard to discover literature over the centuries.

The course, resulting from begin within the autumn, known as Literature (Taylor’s Version) and shall be added to the grasp’s diploma in language and literature.

Ms McCausland advised The Guardian: “What I want to do is show students that although these texts might seem inaccessible, they can be accessible if we look at them from a slightly different angle.

“So, Shakespeare, ultimately, is definitely addressing a whole lot of the identical questions as Taylor Swift is at present, which appears loopy. But he’s.”

The tutorial stated that in Swift’s The Great War she noticed parallels with how Sylvia Plath wrote about struggle and battle to indicate the ache she felt in her poem Daddy.

Also, the best way the US singer’s track Mad Woman covers patriarchy and psychological well being may very well be linked to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s brief story The Yellow Wallpaper.

Ms McCausland insisted the “primary focus is literature” and the course can be grounded in teachers, fairly than organising a fan membership, however she desires her college students to “think critically about Swift”.

“I want to show my students how much fun historical English literature can be,” she advised Het Laaatste Nieuws.

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She is not the primary to convey Swift into the college classroom.

New York University’s Clive Davis Institute launched a Swift-inspired course final 12 months.

It coated Swift’s evolution as a music entrepreneur, the legacy of pop and nation songwriters, discourses of youth and girlhood, and the politics of race in up to date common music.