Background: There is a course on Taylor Swift at Harvard. People online are upset.
The author of the article states there are “several different ways to think about the times we live in through the lens of Taylor Swift.”
- “Swift is very, very good at what she does… her success is a result of several different factors, including her incandescent whiteness, her seeming approachability, and a massive media machine that carefully matches her public persona… with her fan base, one with which she has very, very carefully and assiduously cultivated a long and near-intimate relationship.”
“Her relationship to her fans… raise questions about gender and whiteness, and persuade us to think more deeply about the nature of fandom as both a natural expression and a carefully manipulated media creation”
- “[C]ritically analysing the networks of power and influence that make Taylor Swift… helps to demystify the idea of instant and uncomplicated celebrity.”
“Taylor Swift as a cultural phenomenon helps us better understand how capitalism works… in its embeddedness in seemingly affective frameworks like fandom and celebrity.”
- “Swift is also especially well known for her public statements on the matter of artists and their ownership of their material, most famously in the dispute over the masters of her work.”
“The legal conflicts over ownership of her material provide a way to think through the thicket of questions surrounding intellectual property and the matter of property “rights” in an age of streaming and TikToks. (And the question of who owns her work should not descend into a celebration of girlboss feminism but involve a discussion of Swift’s place in forms of predatory capitalism).”
- “The contempt in which so many hold her music and lyrics as insignificant because they’re too popular leads to a world of questions about the very nature of taste and taste-making.”
The professor of the course, Dr. Stephanie Burt also responded to this line of criticism, “[T]hey should remember literally everything that takes up a lot of time in a modern English department was at one point a low-prestige popular art form that you wouldn’t bother to study, like Shakespeare’s sonnets and, in particular, the rise of the novel.”
In conclusion,
“Everyone should take a course on Taylor Swift.”
