Interview: Scala Speaks Now on Swiftian Storytelling

UT English Professor Elizabeth Scala is the mastermind behind the Taylor Swift English class that made headlines (arguably the first of its kind). Afterglow sat down with Scala to talk Taylor and The Story of Her Class.

Written by Anjali Krishna

Image courtesy Amy Sussman

Scala is the medievalist scholar teaching E 314L, Texts and Contexts: Taylor Swift Songbook. In 314L, a professor chooses a topic to explore introductory level English course topics through. Scala selected the work of Taylor Swift, putting Swift at the level of songwriters like Bob Dylan, who UT has held classes about. We talked about Romeo and Juliet, the poetic genius behind Red, and everything in between,

Afterglow: Thanks so much for sitting down with me. Can we first talk about what exactly this class is? 

Scala: [Texts and Contexts] is an intro to literary studies, [even though] many students who take that class are never going to be English majors. So the course has minor ambitions: to get students to read critically, and learn how to do specific Literary Studies Research. Any kind of content can really be tailored to those basic goals, so it's not a course for majors. We have a whole bunch of variations for the course already. So, whoever's teaching picks a few books, and we try to read for depth and not breath [to] get those basic skills.

Why did you decide to teach Texts and Contexts about Taylor Swift?

I’m always trying to get students interested in older literature that they think is difficult and boring, like medieval and Renaissance cannon. [Over the years] I’ve [thought] of different ways to make this really interesting  and my old way of doing it was to teach Harry Potter, so I would teach this course as a Harry Potter course. And we would wind up reading a lot of medieval romance and adventure stories. 

In the pandemic, we all discovered that we had to find new and exciting hobbies, so we [got]  into baking and gardening and all this other stuff. One of the many things that I picked up – or doubled down on – in the pandemic was Taylor Swift, and that was because my daughter was home for a year. 

She DJed our Spotify and so we listened to a lot of Taylor Swift. She kind of got me really into her in a way I hadn't listened to her before. 

At home, I was doing my work and getting my course descriptions ready, and starting to think about the theme for the next year (last November). And I was like, what if we trade out Harry Potter for Taylor Swift? I said it kind of as a goof. But then I kept listening to Red (Taylor’s Version), and I was like, ‘Oh, this song is nothing but simile and metaphor. “All Too Well” is every single thing that I teach in [Texts and Contexts].’ I was like, I could totally do this.

What does the course curriculum look like?

For a while, I did think I was going to work in more than the American literary tradition, but that is not really my wheelhouse. I'm not a 19th century Americanist; I’m a medievalist.  [Swift] writes love songs and breakup songs, and all that heart, heartache, and misery, and joy is all in classical, Medieval and Renaissance poetry. So I just went back to what I knew, and put her into conversation with those other writers. It's always a kind of happy accident when you do it, because I'm not that kind of professor who works out every single detail in advance. 

Maybe the night before, I start to write down my notes and closely read the work and think really hard about how the meaning is getting made between the parts of the stanzas or the different parts of the song. And then all of a sudden, you know, I look like a genius because all of a sudden, we're reading a Shakespeare sonnet that's full of these autumn colors of yellow and orange and red, right after we've just read “Red.” [But] it's not always “Love Story” and Romeo and Juliet; just because one text mentions another text doesn’t mean it’s where the most interesting thing is going to be found. 

Almost every week has some song or a set of Swift songs that are in conversation with the literature that we're working on. It’s eclectic, I jump all over the place. We're not talking about her development. As writers, we're kind of just having fun taking different songs from all different eras of her career, and really working on the literary strategies that she uses in those songs in order to help students actually be able to talk about them in a literary way.

What do you want students to take away from the course, and how does Swift help do that?

Taylor Swift makes them more patient and interested. If you've taken AP English, or IB, English, or any kind of honors English, you've gotten all the literary terms, and you've been taught how to write the five paragraph essay in this really formulaic way. I think [students] feel, and rightly so, like, ‘I'm doing this over again, and it's terrible.’ [So]all that high school English teachers tell the students to do, I tell them is verboten. Don't tell me that there's a theme in the book, because that's like telling me there's a sentence in the book. What am I supposed to do with it now that I’ve collected them? There's an infinite number of themes. I don't want to know that's in there nor do I want to know what it says. Because then you're paraphrasing. [This class teaches students to ask] ‘what does it do?’ [and] that’s been the big shake up: to talk about what devices they've been learning to identify, (and ask) ‘what do those devices do’?

What have been some interesting realizations in the class so far?

I put Romeo and Juliet on the syllabus, and I didn't really know what was going to happen. I had spent a long time talking about sonnet sequences and the structure of sonnet and what a sonnet did. Nobody had known that the prologue is a sonnet or that Romeo and Juliet’s first conversation makes a sonnet. This is how you know that they really are in love, and that he and Rosalyn are not in love. He's like a bad Petrarchan, and with her, and he becomes a good Petrarchan when he meets Juliet. [When we discussed this in class] I could not believe [the students’]  faces. We had this nice moment where all of the poetry analysis came to fruition in the play, because you needed to know notice that when people rhymed with each other in a conversation, something was happening, or when there was an internal rhyme in lines, we were being told something about how to take a particular scene character or relationship. It wasn't just there because Shakespeare couldn't think of anything else to do on Tuesday.

What writers do you think Taylor unconsciously/intentionally mimics the styles of in music and writing? Have you explored any of these similarities in class? 

I do think that she is a really thoughtful, lyrical stylist. And so I love these Instagram posts (where) it's like, ‘Taylor is teaching us English.’ For example, (the word) indelible (in “The Lakes”). We've all run to the dictionary to find out what this means. She's got a fantastic vocabulary, and she also knows a lot of old fashioned phrasings and uses them extremely well. As an English teacher, I would say the biggest problem we have is young people who don't read a lot, who listen and watch a lot of films and YouTube. 

She's got the ear of a reader; I can hear it in her phrasing. So I am much more appreciative of her phrasing, her syntax, her use of cliches and sayings that are a little out of date. She's a historical reader. And I can tell you, she talks about the book she reads, she's read Jane Eyre; “Invisible String” is kind of an allusion to that. She's read Rebecca; “Tolerate It” was a song she thought of in relation to the main character of that book.

She thinks like a poet. She writes like a poet. The beginning of a line uses a word one way, and then the end of the line uses it a different way. I love those. The example that comes to mind is in “All Too Well” when she says “Autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place.” Autumn leaves falling [into] pieces, turns into pieces falling. She does that a lot in her songs.

[She does] nothing but talk about writing. She says she walks around with a notebook and writes down words that she really likes. 

I told my students this: if you want to be a writer of some kind, you need to collect words.When you read critical essays and you're like, ‘wow, this person sounds really smart,’ look at the verb they use or the connector word. And the next time you're writing, you're gonna stick that word into your own writing. There's no other way to do it, other than to consciously borrow things from other people. She tells great stories, but she is able to tell them so quickly in one verse, because she's got really compressed metaphors in her head.

What do you think are the components of a great Taylor Swift song?

Who doesn't love that woman's bridges, right? Her bridges turn things mean. First of all, I love the way [that] in a lot of them, she speeds up on the bridge. She gets breathy, and she gets all of this stuff in. I really love when she inverts things in her bridges. The most obvious is the bridge of “The Man.” She tells the story one way and then she uses all the same verbs and flips it to [show] how bad it would be if a woman did it. Like when guys do it, it's great, but when women do it, it's terrible. She does it with language; I love that. She's got – I hate to say this for somebody who is really into the lyrics – she's got great melodies. They're catchy. I call her an infectious songwriter.

What is your favorite song on Midnights?

It was “Anti-Hero” because I'm a literature professor, and she has a song called “Anti-Hero” with herself as a protagonist who's an antihero. Could I love this woman more now? But I realized I woke up this morning with “Maroon” in my head, and then this afternoon, [when] I was home, I was humming a song and I'm like, wait a minute, what song is this? And I was trying to figure it out: it was “Question…?”

Afterglow: Why are Taylor Swift lyrics worthy of lyrical analysis, compared to other modern pop stars?

Music is a funky thing. It's what you grew up on and what you identify with, what you think is radical, whoever you are. And whatever your chosen era is, Taylor Swift is radical for us – whoever that ‘us’ happens to be. Women are tired of not being taken seriously, and the fire is burning hot. Women are not taken seriously in terms of not only what they have to say, but in anybody caring about what women like and what women enjoy.

I talked to my daughter, the Swiftie, who got me on this path. She said, ‘Yeah, the Beatles are great. But would they be who they are without the screaming girls on the shores of the United States? When they got on the plane? Everybody makes fun of what girls love and yet their tastes drive culture.’

This interview has been minimally edited for clarity and length.