Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. She is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At age 14, Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at 15, she signed her first record deal.
Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s in the US. Its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008.
Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", it became the US' best-selling album of 2009 and was certified diamond in the US. The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest Album of the Year winner.
How Taylor Swift is inspiring students at the University of Texas with her songwriting
us.hola.comTaylor Swift continues to inspire University students across the United States. This time the University of Texas at Austin will be adding an exciting English course to their curriculum, titled ‘The Taylor Swift Songbook.’Just in time for Fall 2022 semester, students will enjoy Taylor’s work, while they learn about famous poets, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wyatt, Coleridge, Keats, Dickinson and Plath.Professor Elizabeth Scala will be using the singer-songwriter’s songbook and the cultural context, to start class participation and debates. “This course uses 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,” Scala explained.The course focuses “on Swift’s music and the cultural contexts in which it and her career are situated.” The students will consider “frameworks for understanding her work, such as poetic form, style, and history among various matters and theoretical issues important to contextualization” as they practice “close and in-depth reading, evaluating secondary sources, and building strong arguments.”Professor Scala also shared her thoughts about the importance and innovation that this course brings for students. “I want to take what Swift fans can already do at a sophisticated level, tease it out for them a bit with a different vocabulary.”She continued explaining that she wants to “show them how, in fact, Swift draws on richer literary traditions in her songwriting, both topically but also formally in terms of how she uses references, metaphors, and clever manipulations of words.”.
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