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Event Description
When a “singer-songwriter” writes lyrics, is she writing poetry? She is when she’s Taylor Swift, according to University of Texas English Professor Elizabeth Scala.
The Arlington Museum of Art is thrilled to welcome Dr. Elizabeth Scala as our next Articulate Lecture Series guest speaker and the first of our Summer 2023 exhibition season. Dr. Scala, an expert in Chaucer, will lead us in a fun and fascinating talk about how Swift’s music and lyrics incorporate the same literary devices, figures, traditions, and tropes found in great poems by the likes of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wyatt, Coleridge, Keats, Dickinson, and Plath.
“…Swift draws on richer literary traditions in her songwriting, both topically but also formally in terms of how she uses references, metaphors, and clever manipulations of words,” Scala said in an interview with CNN in 2022.
Dr. Elizabeth Scala is an English Professor at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas. She writes and teaches about Chaucer and the textual environments of medieval literature. In the Fall 2022 semester, she launched a new class entitled “Literary Contests and Contexts — The Taylor Swift Songbook” in which lyrics from Swift’s albums Red (Taylor’s Version), Lover, folklore, and evermore were taught alongside that of Western literature greats. Follow Dr. Scala at @Swiftieprof on Instagram.
ARTICULATE, a series of in-person talks by experts, is a collaborative programming series by the Arlington Museum of Art dedicated to nurturing life-long art lovers, building community through conversation, and inspiring the next generation of creatives.
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