This article originally appeared at The Conversation, where is an occasional series highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.

Title of course:

“The Taylor Swift Songbook”

What prompted the idea for the course?

This class is part of a group of introductory English offerings that focus on basic methods of literary analysis and research. It fulfills different requirements for potential English majors and the general student population, so I am always looking for news ways to engage them.

For a few years, I taught it as a Harry Potter course. I introduced students to classic British literature by exploring the Romantic and medieval literary traditions present in the novel.

But earlier this year, I realized I was bored. I had been listening to a lot of Taylor Swift with my college-aged daughter, who had been home for a year during the pandemic. Swift had recently released “.”

Listening to her track “” was my epiphany. ���ɾ��ڳ�’s vivid imagery and emotionally gripping detail had all the markings of a great narrative poem. She writes the song in a way that mirrors the recursions of memory. Her verses become increasingly strong and build upon each other once she starts remembering the past. At the same time, the song’s imagery moves from fall to winter as she reflects upon the relationship’s beginning and frosty end.

What does the course explore?

This course pairs Taylor Swift songs with a number of poems, along with a play, a novel and a film.

The semester began with the pairing of ���ɾ��ڳ�’s songs with Renaissance love poetry. One class analyzing the metaphors, similes and colors in the song “Red” turned, a week or so later, into an exploration of Shakespeare’s use of similar colors in his famous sonnet 73: “.”

From “Red”:

Loving him was blue like I’d never known

Missing him was dark gray, all alone …

But loving him was red

Shakespeare, meanwhile, begins his sonnet 73 with “That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang,” before pointing to the oranges of autumn’s “sunset [that] fadeth in the west” and “the glowing of such fire / That on the ashes of his youth doth lie.”

Where Swift moves from cool tones to “burning red,” Shakespeare moves through increasingly warm tones: from yellow, to orange, to red. But both move toward an intensity of color and heat.

Some couplings are obvious. For instance, ���ɾ��ڳ�’s “” mentions the title characters of Shakespeare’s “” – “Romeo save me, I’ve been feeling so alone.”

Others might come as more of a surprise: I paired Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel “,” which Alfred Hitchcock in 1940, with ���ɾ��ڳ�’s song “.”

Centering on a scandalous woman named Rebecca – or Rebekah, in ���ɾ��ڳ�’s song – the song, novel and film explore the relations of mad women and madwomen, the tenuous line between anger and craziness. It’s a theme Swift hits on in a number of songs, from her 2019 track “” to 2020’s “,” which I paired with Sylvia Plath’s poem “.”

Why is this course relevant now?

I think this course tapped into the zeitgeist in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I first dreamed it up. Of course, ���ɾ��ڳ�’s music is popular, and she has long had a devoted following. But the October 2022 release of her album “” has only made the course seem more relevant to students’ interests. As a class, we spent time exploring the ways tracks on “Midnights” revisited themes and writing strategies that appeared in ���ɾ��ڳ�’s earlier songs.

What’s a critical lesson from the course?

Analyzing ���ɾ��ڳ�’s writing will hopefully help my students recognize how certain poetic and literary devices operate in older texts – as much as those same books and poems from the past help them appreciate ���ɾ��ڳ�’s art at a deeper level. They seem especially eager to engage with older materials, like Renaissance seduction poetry and black and white film, when they can see traces of the same artistic techniques in the music videos and songs they watch and listen to today.

���ɾ��ڳ�’s is attached to an English and American literary past in both obvious and more subtle ways. , Swift deploys forms – like metaphors, conceits and structures – that are part of a shared literary heritage that students might otherwise find old-fashioned and irrelevant.

Far from diminishing the value of ���ɾ��ڳ�’s writing, tracing its connection to the literary greats shores up her authority as a creative artist. Swift, like all artists, is part of a , and she calls upon it to create new works.

What materials does the course feature?

• “,” Adam Bradley, 2019
• “,” Alfred Hitchcock, 1940
• “,” Taylor Swift, 2020

What will the course prepare students to do?

This course has rather modest ambitions. It prepares careful and critical readers, as well as articulate writers and researchers.

It pays attention to what language denotes at the surface and what it carries around with it in its connotations and associations. It teaches students about those features, using the Oxford English Dictionary as a research tool to probe linguistic origin, register and usage beyond what a term literally means.

While delivering New York University’s 2022 commencement speech, to embrace their enthusiasms and be unafraid to explore their interests.

Finding a way to tap into students’ enthusiasm for Swift, and tie her songwriting to literary methodologies, is my version of following her lead.

Unusual Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

If you went to high school in the United States anytime since the 1960s, you were likely assigned some of the following books: Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” “Julius Caesar” and “Macbeth”; John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”; Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”; and William Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies.”

For many former students, these books and other so-called “classics” represent high school English. But despite the efforts of reformers, both and , the most frequently assigned titles have never represented America’s diverse student body.

Why did these books become classics in the U.S.? How have they withstood challenges to their status? And will they continue to dominate high school reading lists? Or will they be replaced by a different set of books that will become classics for students in the 21st century?

The high school canon

The set of books that is taught again and again, broadly across the country, is referred to by literature scholars and English teachers as “the canon.”

The high school canon has been shaped by many factors. Shakespeare’s plays, especially “Macbeth” and “Julius Caesar,” have been taught consistently , when the curriculum was determined by college entrance requirements. Others, like “To Kill a Mockingbird,” winner of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, were ushered into the classroom by current events – in the case of Lee’s book, . Some books just seem especially suited for classroom teaching: “Of Mice and Men” has a straightforward plot, easily identifiable themes and is under 100 pages long.

Titles become “traditional” when they are passed down through generations. As the education historian Jonna Perrillo observes, of having their children study the same books that they once did.

The last period of significant change to the canon was during the 1960s and 1970s, when the largest generation of the 20th century, the baby boomers, went to high school. For instance, in 1963, at Evanston Township High School in Illinois revealed that “To Kill a Mockingbird,” first published in 1960, was by far the “most enjoyed book,” followed by two books that had been published in the 1950s, J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” and Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies.” None of these books were yet traditional, yet they became so for the next generation.

A comparison of national surveys conducted in 1963 and 1988 shows how several books that were introduced to the classroom when the boomers were students had become classics when boomers were teachers.

During the 1960s and 1970s, teachers even reframed “Romeo and Juliet” as a contemporary work. Lesson plans from the era referred to its adaptations into “” – a musical that – and Franco Zefferelli’s of Shakespeare’s story of star-crossed lovers. It became the perfect hook for ninth graders in a study of Shakespeare that would conclude in 12th grade with “Macbeth.”

Efforts to diversify

English education professor that, since the 1960s, “leaders in the profession of English teaching have tried to broaden the curriculum to include more selections by women and minority authors.” But in the late 1980s, according to his findings, the high school “top ten” still included only one book by a woman – Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” – and none by minority authors.

At that time, a was underway about whether America was a “melting pot” in which many cultures became one, or a colorful “mosaic” in which many cultures coexisted. Proponents of the latter view argued for a multicultural canon, but they were ultimately unable to establish one. A 2011 survey of Southern schools by Joyce Stallworth and Louel C. Gibbons, published in “English Leadership Quarterly,” found that the five most frequently taught books were all traditional selections: “The Great Gatsby,” “Romeo and Juliet,” Homer’s “The Odyssey,” Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

One explanation for this persistence is that the canon is not simply a list: It takes form as stacks of copies on shelves in the storage area known as the “book room.” Changes to the inventory require time, money and effort. Depending on the district, replacing a classic . And it would create more work for teachers who are already maxed out.

“Too many teachers, probably myself included, teach from the traditional canon,” a teacher told Stallworth and Gibbons. “We are overworked and underpaid and struggle to find the time to develop quality lessons for new books.”

The end of an era?

Esau McCauley, the author of “Reading While Black,” describes the list of classics by white authors as the “.” At least two factors suggest that its dominance over the curriculum is coming to an end.

First, the battles over which books should be taught have become more intense than ever. On the one hand, progressives like the teachers of the growing call for the inclusion of books by – and they question the status of the classics. On the other hand, conservatives have challenged or successfully banned the teaching of many new books that deal with gender and sexuality or race.

PEN America, a nonprofit organization that fights for free expression for writers, reports “” in book bans. The outcome might be a literature curriculum that more resembles the political divisions in this country. Much more than in the past, students in conservative and progressive districts might read very different books.

Second, English Language Arts education itself is changing. State standards, such as those , no longer make the teaching of literature the primary focus of English class. Instead, there is a new emphasis on “.” And while preceding generations of teachers voiced concerns about the distractions of and then , books may have an even smaller share of students’ attention in .

“We no longer live in a print-dominant, text-only world,” the National Council of Teachers of English proclaims in . The group calls for English teachers to put less emphasis on books in order to train students to use and analyze a variety of media. Accordingly, students across the country may not only have fewer books in common, but they also may be reading fewer books altogether.

Why teach literature?

Over generations, English teachers have voiced many reasons to teach books, and the canon in particular: to instill a , foster , build and cultivate . These goals have little to do with the skills emphasized by contemporary academic standards. But if literature is going to continue to be an important part of American education, it is important to talk not only about what books to teach, but the reasons why.

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