Why read Taylor Swift as literature?

and other questions I get asked a lot

This week’s newsletter answers some questions I get a lot, starting with the big one.

Why read Taylor Swift as literature?

Taylor Swift was already in the academy before we started teaching classes on her - in the conversations we and our students were having, in the backs of our minds, in the methods we borrowed from our study of other texts to help us read hers. If you look at how Swift is being read outside of university settings, you will find what sometimes feels like a vast extracurricular literature seminar. Millions of people are engaging with, thinking about, and analyzing the texts of Swift’s lyrics in ways that are very similar to the way we study literature in literature departments - and this is no coincidence, as people use the tools they gain from literature classes they’ve taken (or taught) to understand Swift’s work. Right now, I feel like conversations around Taylor Swift are some of the most vital and enthusiastic discussions of what the study of literature is and should be. Swift also talks about literature and literariness in her work; she is driving the public’s engagement with literary figures such as William Wordsworth, William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas. (I have seen reactions to TTPD by people who claimed never to have heard of Dylan Thomas before Swift’s mention of him in a song). I think you need to take Swift’s work into account if you want to understand what is going on with English literature as a field right now.

Does it matter that she writes collaboratively? Does this mean it is wrong to study her work as if she is an ‘author’?

No. All writing is a collaboration - between the writer, the editor, and their readers (those who helped shape what they write, and those interpreting it). As a society, we have a myth of a solitary author writing away in a garret, but this is just a myth. If you take the example of William Shakespeare: we know he wrote some of his plays collaboratively. Some of his plays were edited and added to after his death (e.g. Macbeth by Thomas Middleton, according to some scholars), and those altered texts are the versions that survive. The First Folio was compiled several years after his death by people intent on putting forward a specific narrative about Shakespeare’s genius. Even during his lifetime, he was working with an awareness that discussions of sensitive topics could be censored. And even the versions of his plays that were printed while he was alive survive in multiple different and contradictory versions and are riddled with typographical errors. I wrote an article for The Conversation in which I tried to make this point but the editor cut it out of the article, which has my name on it and which I’d say I ‘wrote’ but which I did not have complete control over. Taylor Swift is actually much closer to having written all the words attributed to her than Shakespeare, but that doesn’t matter; we study texts, not authors.

But will her writing last? Will people still read her work in fifty years?

Lol who knows what the future will want from its art? We don’t know whether, in fifty years, anyone will care about Shakespeare either. We can attest to what we care about and what feels important to us.

Isn’t Swift overexposed / why not study other things?

I think the fact of Swift’s popularity is inherently interesting. That’s what draws me to this topic. I study the reception of Virgil in the Renaissance for similar reasons - because I’m fascinated by popular authors. This is just my scholarly interest, and there is room for other people to have other interests. That said, the media coverage makes it seem like there are more courses on Swift and literature than there actually are; a very small proportion of undergraduates are being given the option to study Swift once as a part of three to four years of undergraduate study.

Why can’t young people read complicated texts that expand their minds instead of simple things like the lyrics of Taylor Swift?

Anything can be complex if approached with intelligence and patience. The questions that arise from the study of Swift do not feel to me different in kind from the questions that arise from the study of Virgil or Spenser. Maybe the fact that a lot of people are studying this means it actually is more complex than you might think? Sometimes things feel simple to us because we have not yet been exposed to the faultlines within them by good criticism. People looked down on plays and novels once, assuming that these genres had nothing important to say. That said, I always tell my students, you need to make the case for the “so what” of your writing: why does it matter that you have noticed these things about the text? Good critical writing proves its own necessity.

Are you a Swiftie? / You must love Taylor Swift!

I appreciate Swift’s work. I struggle to call myself a Swiftie as I worry it carries with it the air of simply loving her work uncritically; but I know enough about Swifties to understand that they are anything but uncritical. Maybe a key part of faith (in anything) is doubting that faith? I think a Swiftie would have gotten Eras Tour tickets but I didn’t bother because the movie was coming out and they were expensive. I’m not sure I like the idea of laying claim to an identity that has to do with liking something, though isn’t that what being an English literature academic is? (Discuss with reference to your degree of enjoyment of English literature and/or Taylor Swift).

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You can hear me talk about Swift’s life and legacy at Juju’s Bar and Stage in East London on May 28th. It’s an event run by Seed Talks, which organizes talks by academics for popular audiences. I think it should be fun! I mean, I’d definitely want to go to a talk about Taylor Swift at a bar on a Tuesday night - after all, if it’s horrible you can always drown your sorrows. I think you can also sign up for livestream tickets if you’re not in London.

Or indeed you can also hear me talk about Swift in a more scholarly register (for free!) at 'Fuck the Patriarchy': A Taylor Swift Conference at the University of Kent on May 31st. The conference welcomes Swifties as well as students and academics. There is an online-only segment of the conference the day before as well.

I thought this New Yorker article on “Why Normal Music Reviews No Longer Make Sense for Taylor Swift” by Sinéad O’Sullivan was really interesting. O’Sullivan makes the point here that the music is irrelevent to the narrative work that is being done in Swift’s new album - work that Swifties pick up on but that people focusing on evaluating the album according to ordinary criteria of reviewing music are missing or misunderstanding:

In the Swiftverse, the music itself is not the point but the way in which the point is delivered. That’s not to say that the music is irrelevant; it serves a crucial purpose. But this purpose is different depending on whether you’re a diehard Swiftie or a casual listener. A common critique of “T.T.P.D.” is that it’s devoid of stylistic evolution, with too many references to Swift’s previous albums. Swifties understand that these Easter eggs add another dimension to a song or story they thought they knew. In the opening of “So Long, London,” a track on “T.T.P.D.,” staunch fans will recognize a pulsing sound akin to an effect used in “Call It What You Want,” from the album “Reputation.” Roughly halfway through the song, there’s also an “ah, ah” sound similar to part of the chorus of “Dress,” another “Reputation” track. On one hand, it’s reasonable for non-Swifties to assume that the artist, working with her longtime collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, has unintentionally rehashed some of her old work. On the other, it’s kind of crazy to think that Swift is capable of doing anything without intentionality. Assuming the callbacks in “So Long, London” are deliberate, they rather beautifully bookend the beginning and ending of Swift’s six-year relationship with the actor Joe Alwyn. Most musicians—and artists more generally—can only dream of their fan base picking up on such subtleties. It’s ironic that, in Swift’s case, these subtleties have led to some of her fiercest criticism.

I don’t completely agree with every point made in this piece as a whole but I do agree that, as O’Sullivan puts it, “any critique of Swift’s work that doesn’t consider her role as one of the most prominent narrators of our time—and certainly anything that critiques her work as one-dimensional when she’s playing a kind of 4-D chess—will fail to speak to even the most casual of her fans.”

A similarly-titled but very different article by Jessica Karl, “Taylor Swift Is Proof That How We Critique Music Is Broken,” inveighs against “hasty reviews.” (Thanks to Meredith for sending me this one!)

I really enjoyed this close reading of TTPD by Isabel at “wild and unwise” which finds wild humor in its formal choices, particularly its rhymes:

Fifteen seconds in, once again using a lack of rhyme to underscore how far this journey will take us from the bounds of the ordinary and the sane, she identifies as a functional alcoholic (dark, but normal) until nobody noticed her new aesthetic (a thing only a person you would instantly back away from at a party would say). She pulls an unbelievably funny gotcha, wailing: I’m having his baby! No I’m not, but you should see your faces! She snarls, with dark grandiosity, So tell me everything is not about me… BUT WHAT IF IT IS? She drops the sick burn of “Jehovah’s Witness suit” and then crescendoes to a sputtering incredulity that leaves her searching for increasingly absurd explanations for an incomprehensible betrayal: “Were you writing a book? Were you a sleeper-cell spy???” She sounds, not infrequently, like a person who has totally fucking lost it, or who perhaps never really had “it” to begin with—or, as she puts it in the exquisitely titled I Look In People’s Windows, “like I’m some deranged weirdo.”

Isabel argues against seeing enjoyment and undersanding of Swift as “lore-dependent” (i.e. based on your knowledge of biographical trivia) but notes that her work has a kind of accretive meaning:

If you’re familiar with her work, Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve, another song about looking back at a damaging encounter with an older man, is impossible to listen to without thinking about Dear John because of their shared insisted-upon repetition of nineteen. Noticing that connection doesn’t require any knowledge about or investment in who those songs might be about, or even the conviction that they were inspired by the same real-life events or draw from reality at all. Nor is it a knock against Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve to suggest it lands just a little differently if you know Dear John, any more than it would be a knock against Dylan’s Sara to suggest that the fourth verse hits a little harder if you’ve ever listened to Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. And I don’t think it takes away from either song to read the story that emerges when you place them side by side: at nineteen, the girl in the dress thought she had played with fire and walked out unscathed; years later, the woman she became knows better.

I think this is a very good argument for why the narrative matters without the author’s life mattering - i.e. for an essentially literary reading of Swift.

I think I will take a break from the newsletter for a week, though this might change if something really outrageous happens in the realm of Swift and literature. In the meantime, your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to join me in reading a book we know Swift read and liked: Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing. (Apparently Swift started writing a song for the movie version of the book the moment she heard it was being adapted.) I picked up a Kindle copy of it for 99p and am curious to see what this book can tell us about Swift’s literary sensibilities. All I know about this book besides the fact that Swift read it is that the movie version was not a critical hit and that the author is wanted for questioning over a murder in Zambia.

I’ve been making improvements to the newsletter’s Substack home page, particularly by creating a bibliography of scholarly work on Swift:

Oh and - I changed the name of the newsletter! The title “Taylor Swift and Literature” felt more like a subtitle (and it’s also the name of my class) so I renamed this newsletter “The Manuscript,” after Swift’s new song.

As I was changing the name of the newsletter, I noticed there is now an option to use AI to create a logo. Expecting the worst, I typed “Taylor Swift as literature” as a prompt. The worst is, in fact, what I got.

That’s it - see you in two weeks! In the meantime, if you know of anyone who might want to read this newsletter, please let them know about it :)