"She plans to explore the link in her final paper. 'I hesitate to say that the song was anywhere near the genius of Sylvia Plath — no offense to Taylor Swift — but I can definitely see some similarities in the themes, like sadness, depression and mental health,' Ms. DeAscentiis, 20, said.... 'The way that Taylor overlays her relationship with the significant other that she’s talking about in the song with the relationship that she has with her father — I think that was very Plath,' she added."
I'm reading the NYT article
"Harvard’s Taylor Swift Scholars Have Thoughts on 'Tortured Poets'/The students taking Harvard University’s class on the singer are studying up. Their final papers are due at the end of the month."
In the Harvard undergrad course called "Taylor Swift and Her World" student compare Taylor Swift song lyrics to the work of poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.
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41 comments:
I once wrote a college paper comparing and contrasting a song from the band REM to -- I can't even remember the literature text. It was probably something by Whitman. The professor very gently and kindly eviscerated me.
I took an Introduction to Poetry course at the University of Michigan in the early 1970s and the anthology had a section in the end with Beatles lyrics. Our assignment was to write a paper about some other popular song lyrics. I probably still have the paper I wrote about "Maggie Mae" (the Rod Stewart song).
Coleridge was chiefly an essayist. Also he wrote op-eds for more than a decade and people collected them. Best op-ed line, a conflict of interest is the pulley on which good character is hoist into public view.
His poetry featured mostly hidden internal alliteration: bathed by the mist.
I was stem so in middle school I wrote a paper analyzing the impact of types of music on plant growth. 80s metal was the winner…
I once noted that Tiffany Eckhardt's "Talk About" from Looking for Signs was formally a barcarolle.
Stanley Cavell analyzed the Ancient Mariner as about science and general skepticism, something that actually interested Coleridge as a philosopher. Coleridge's essay on Kant is enough to get you to read Kant for pleasure.
serious question:
how much, would the Interest on the Student Loan for this Taylor Swift class cost per year?
another clue why we are in fast decline.
Anything but standards.
And Rod is still rocking. He gives me a reason to believe.
congratulations taxpayers! I hope you enjoy reading receipts like this of what your student loan bailout tax money is paying for
Just another self-indulgent filler class...these are as academically vacant as DEI courses...they keep spoiled children happy I guess.
How about Marvel Comics versus Greek Mythology?
How about the history of the Isle of Lesbos versus Contemporary Urban Gay Pride parades?
Spare the rod, spoil the child?
I wrote a paper for a sociology class in college about one of Pink Floyds album lyrics. It actually was about sociology. A+ Teacher loved it.
They should be studying Lord Byron instead.
I once wrote a paper in the one and only Humanities course I had to take as a freshman engineering student comparing Nietzsche to Bernie Parent.
Everyone knows that Harvard undergrad is bullshit worthless. It's primarily for getting rich people to give huge endowments to get their dip shit spawn enrolled. They use that money to leverage first rate graduate research. It's the exact opposite of MIT.
I actually don't mind the idea of a class about Taylor Swift or Harry Potter, because both are huge cultural phenomena which have had an outsized economic and social impact on the west, and to some extent do reflect a lot of the culture and beliefs of the times.
Althouse leaves it loudly unspoken: Taylor Swift is no Bob Dylan.
I once read an essay by the American composer David Diamond that compared Beatles songs to the German lieder of composers like Schubert and Brahms. While it took the Beatles a bit too seriously, it was nice to see a professional admire their musical genius.
I have probably heard a Taylor Swift song, and maybe they're poetry, but few such things ever are. In fairness, also, very few poets are good, especially this spoken word and hip-hop crap, for the most part, though there are rare and surprising exceptions.
But college is where students should be studying the history of our culture, not easy presentism.
Sylvia Plath's "confessionals" are unreliable. The poem "Daddy" depicts her father, a German entymologist of bees, as a nazi and molester. Maybe it's true. Maybe not. He died brutally and young after a lifetime of type 1 diabetes, at a time when that meant amputations and frequent fits of entirely disease-induced anger, and often deadly seizures brought on by the slightest blood sugar malfunction, before we had better treatments. That certainly may have triggered a lifetime of terror in her. It did for me.
A rich topic -- type 1, constant anxiety and fear of coma, amputation and sudden death -- and yet an academic life committed to studying the most forbidden and stinging fruit: honeybees.
Much more interesting than the Nazi accusation poem titled "Daddy" is a piece of Plath near-juvenalia about her father, titled "The Beekeeper's Daughter." The young student would do well to compare the two poems and the controversial Confessional movement than to focus academic time on pop songs.
But I was purged from teaching poetry or anything else 30 years ago because I believed the wrong things and wrote them. I was a very good poetry teacher. Oh well. Academics would sting proudly like bees if it cost them nothing, unlike bees, who give their lives to put the stinger in. Such petty odds for us to destroy a life. Send furtive notes: outsource to the deans. It is a guilty pleasure, I confess, like honeybees, to see the very mobs that academics have created coming to reclaim at least some of the hivemind that ruined a half-life of work-time for me.
But there's always stocking shelves in Kroger, where more poetry happens in a 12-hour shift than in any university in this country. A rich and lucky outcome.
I would be unhappy if I were paying tuition for one of my children to study Taylor Swift. Since I am not, I hope they continue to dilute and debase their brand.
rehajm said...
"I was stem so in middle school I wrote a paper analyzing the impact of types of music on plant growth. 80s metal was the winner."
Have you since then considered why 80s metal was the winner? Was it "impact" or "affect?"
@Tina Trent,
“But I was purged from teaching poetry or anything else 30 years ago because I believed the wrong things and wrote them. I was a very good poetry teacher.”
Tina, I would love to hear more about this, if you’re so inclined. Could you comment further?
She's a prolific artist. Makes sense to study her and her works. If one of the goals of learning is to apply knowledge to new things, then it makes sense.
Of all the things happening in the world, Taylor Swift merits course credits at Harvard.
The sophomore is sophomoric. Stands to reason.
Should the value of social studies be correlated with the number of people influenced? Classes of people? Democratic majority or dictatorial minority duality?
How did someone at Paper of Record use the phrase “zeroed in”?
Such violent imagery!!
How did someone at Paper of Record use the phrase “zeroed in”?
Such violent imagery!!
How did someone at The Paper of Record come to use the phrase “zeroed in”?
Such violent imagery!!
I guess these classes have some value as a stress reliever and can help students apply themselves diligently to rinkydink tasks they will be assigned to in the first years of their marketing careers.
How is that for an example of engineering student disdain?
If a class about Taylor Swift also requires you to read Coleridge and Wordsworth and listen to Plath then perhaps it has some value.
It's such a different, albeit similar, genre. Poetry is meant to be read or heard read to you. Song lyrics are similar, but embedded within the music itself. Would setting The Raven to music enhance or lessen its impact? Song lyrics may not have the complexity of (some) poetry, but when done well can have as much of an impact on the listener, due to the added dimension of the music.
That's how I can see a college-level analysis playing out that actually seems interesting.
Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Swift.
Ah, the big four...
'Everyone knows that Harvard undergrad is bullshit worthless. It's primarily for getting rich people to give huge endowments to get their dip shit spawn enrolled. They use that money to leverage first rate graduate research. It's the exact opposite of MIT.'
OMG...we (mostly) agree!
The slight alteration; They use that money to operate a massive hedge fund which pays incredibly low taxes.
Plath. Plath, plath, plath, plath, plath.
So white.
Shoulda been Cardi B.
Daughters and fathers---now there's a subject. My younger daughter changed boyfriends so often in middle and high school that I named them all "Mr. Wonderful". Too much trouble to learn and remember their names.
Ah well she's in her early 50s now, married to a nice guy (I know his name) and the two are parent to two grandchildren. So it all worked out. And lo and behold my soon to be 11 year old granddaughter is a big Taylor Swift fan. I think I'll ask her to write an essay--getting ready for a college course on Swifties. She's pretty smart and ought to be able to satisfy a Harvard prof.
Sylvia Plath wasn’t a genius (“with your love of the rack and the screw” grates)
Her poetry is as bad as Carl Sandburg’s.
Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop have many great poems. I can’t think of any Taylor Swift song that improves on any of their themes.
Dylan and Bowie have some excellent lyrics.
Bowie was way better than Coleridge (“leather leather everywhere but not a myth left from the ghetto” mocks Coleridge and the then English obsession with Black American culture).
Real Andrew: tasked with teaching Women's Studies 101: Women in the 20th Century, I suggested that we use at least 1/3 of the time talking about something other than lesbianism. Previously, I had said that if we were going to study affirmative action, we should read the law and debates around passing it, not just admire it. And I said Audry Lourde was a terrible poet, and damn if she didn't up and die the next day.
They let me transfer to the English Department for teaching but couldn't dump me because they forgot to take my name off the group emails where professors and fellow grad students discussed how to expel me. No actually does mean no when it comes to faculty discussing one student's academic record with other students.
What a cesspool of poltroons.
@Tina Trent,
Kudos to you, and thanks for sharing.
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