Q&A: APSU Honors English Romanticism course fills blank space with Taylor Swift
In the last few years, Austin Peay State University’s Honors Program has found new ways to engage and inspire its students with courses on Dungeon and Dragons, science in the movies and Biblical history and archeology. This semester, that tradition continues with “Readings Arts - Culture: the Invisible String of Romanticism,” which infuses Taylor Swift into the syllabus.
Delaney Atkins, the instructor for the class, recently sat down with APSU communication intern Aalyah Martinez to talk about the new class. Here’s what she had to say.
How long has this course been offered at APSU?
This course is brand new! This is the first semester its being taught and it's all from my brain, I built it from the ground up.
What specific concepts are taught during the course?
So specifically, we started with giving the groundwork of what romanticism is and what it looks at. I used examples from William Wordsworth, who is one of the pioneer of this – specifically English Romanticism – and talked about the concepts of what that looks like in poetry and how it manifests, so nature is a big part of it.
Spontaneous overflow of emotions is another thing, and really kind of getting that everyday language incorporated into poetry, which hadn't happened previously…We use those concepts and the concepts of poetry like poetic devices – metaphor, simile, imagery, those sorts of things – to apply to Taylor Swift’s lyrics and looking at them also considering, concepts of music, the production of it and music videos and really kind of looking at the full picture of her discography through the lens of poetry.
Do students know Taylor Swift plays a role in the course details? What specific concepts are taught in relation to her?
She outright connects it in one of her songs so The Lakes off Folklore, it's a bonus track. In it, she's referencing the Lakes District, which is where William Wordsworth grew up and where he really had a lot of his experience with nature. He'd go on these walks and be inspired and write about it, so she takes that and kind of makes it her own. She outright name drops Wordsworth in it, so she makes that connection very clear in that song.
She does draw on nature a lot like how he does where he ties nature to emotions. For example, she brings up rain in a lot of her songs and how it's a motif that's used throughout her discography, and it's used in different ways, like the rain in Clean is different than the rain in like Fearless.
There's a lot of emotionally driven songs like Dear John and Last Kiss, that you can just feel how she was experiencing those feelings and that loss or the joy of something like paper readings where I think it's infectious; what she is experiencing and then also using very plain everyday language that feels like a diary entry which, she released special editions of her album Lover which included selected diary entries and connects the diary to her lyrics. It shows that she's kind of approaching it the same way Wordsworth did with his poetry.
How did you come up with this course, how did you bring it to life?
I think just my passion for Taylor Swift and Wordsworth, like that's the core of this and how it started. They are two of my favorite things in life, and I could talk forever and ever about either of them. I love this idea of how we can bring more pop culture things into the academic sphere because I think a lot of the times people are, “Oh, that's not academic. You can't talk about Taylor Swift in class,” but I'm like, no, you can.
She uses a lot of poetic language, and she really is in tune with a lot of literary devices and literary references. She talks about “The Great Gatsby,” she talks about William Wordsworth, like it's there. And I think some people would probably listen to a song like Shake it Off and be like, “Oh, that's not academic,” and I can probably make the justification that is, right?
I really wanted to show the students how we can approach things in an interdisciplinary way, which is really the core of what honors wants to do. All our classes fuel that connection between different maybe surprising connections that we have with different disciplines.
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