Harvard English Department Offers a Course on Taylor Swift Is there anyone more worthy of deep study? by Hugh Fitzgerald
https://www.frontpagemag.com/harvard-english-department-offers-a-course-on-taylor-swift/
Harvard’s English Department has just announced a new course, to be taught by Professor Stephanie Burt — né Stephen Burt — on the life and work and miracles of Taylor Swift, a pop country singer well known for her garish and skimpy costumes, her semi-obscene pelvic thrusts this way and that way, and her very public romance (it has already lasted two whole months) with tight end Travis Kelce, complete with air kisses thrown between them at his football games and her concerts, to the delight of tens of thousands present for these premeditated displays of true-blue love. Already, hundreds of Harvard students have signed up, hoping to be selected to take this course. It may be the most oversubscribed course in the history of Harvard’s English Department.
The English Department — or rather, Professor Stephanie L. Burt, who created the course and will be teaching it — describe the course here.
In 2009, you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing Taylor Swift’s “You Belong with Me” on the radio, in grocery stores, and on TV. Harvard English professor Stephanie L. Burt ’94 still remembers the first time she heard it, describing it as so much “better” and “more compelling” than all the other pop songs that were playing at the time.
Fourteen years later, and Burt is still a diehard Swiftie. Her interest in Swift has followed her to the classroom. Next semester, Harvard’s English Department will debut the course “Taylor Swift and Her World,” taught by Burt. In this class, students will earn college credit for their deep dives into Swift’s lyrics, music, and influence, dissecting her catalog and reading a host of authors Burt finds relevant to understanding Swift’s artistry.
This is not to be a course on Taylor Swift alone, though god knows that would be more than enough for those Harvard undergraduates pounding on the doors of Warren House, demanding to be let into Burt’s course. No, it is a course on “Taylor Swift and Her World.” While recognizing the supreme importance of this neo-Renaissance starlette, Professor Burt hopes to examine, through the life and art of Taylor Swift, what it means to be human at a time like this. How can we exist on this giddy globe without the spiritual sustenance provided by our truest guides, who not so long ago were the mom and pop and hip-hop gangsta riffraff who divined and divided and provided our culture with all that was most necessary to survive in a world we never made, but that civilizational torch has passed from all who went before and now has so singularly and so obviously ended up in the gyrating lap of Taylor Swift, who has proven with her songs equal to the task of keeping us all afloat lest we drown in the detritus of this confusing age. Some old fogies may scoff — the kind who want English majors to read Shakespeare and Chaucer and Milton rather than cultural icons of the present — but they have lost that battle. That train has left the station. The drawbridges have been raised. Who, in truth, is more worthy of deep study by the students at Harvard than Taylor Swift, who both embodies and creates the spirit of the age, and has become our surest witness of what is past, and passing, and to come?
A course on Taylor Swift and Her World? Of course. The question is not “why such a course should be given now,” but rather, why such a course has not been given until now, when it has long been obvious that Taylor Swift, this nonpareil sweet singer who now bestrides the world like a colossus in thigh-high boots, and pulls up out of the deepest recesses of our beings an understanding of what it means to be human, or in the case of Taylor Swift herself, superhuman. She is the singular voice we most need to hearken to, and that we ignore at our peril. Where shall we begin her story? And where is she taking us today? And how will Taylor Swift, the philosopher-entertainer we most need in these dark times, lead us through her songs and live performances to the broad sunny uplands that beckon, where civilizational despair turns to hope? Take the course “Taylor Swift and Her World” to find out.
The course instructor, Professor Stephanie Burt, is also a fascinating character, that only the present age could produce. Just a few years ago Stephanie was Professor Stephen Burt, having been male since birth, but then he decided he really should be a she, and so, in 2017, Stephen Burt “transitioned” into being the female Stephanie Burt. Since 2007, first he, and then she, have worked at Harvard University, where he, and then she, became a tenured professor in 2010. In 2023, she, formerly he, was named the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English.
You can view Stephanie Burt reciting one of her poems — “Gymnastic Stephanie” — right here.
I did not think it could come to this. I see that I was wrong.
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