Over the last five years, 360°Sound has been running a series called “Author Talk,” in which we bring readers (and viewers of our YouTube channel) exclusive interviews with authors of new music-related books. For this installment, we spoke with Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol, co-editor of the new academic book The Literary Taylor Swift: Songwriting and Intertextuality. The collection of essays explores Swift’s engagements with literature and treats her songs as literature.
Tontiplaphol is Professor of English at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, where she specializes in 19th century British literature. In addition to writing the introduction to The Literary Taylor Swift with co-editor Anastasia Klimchynskaya, Tontiplaphol contributed the chapter, “Baby, We’re the Late Romantics: Taylor Swift and the English Biedermeier.”
Editor’s Note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Scroll to the bottom to view the full video interview.
360°Sound: How did The Literary Taylor Swift: Songwriting and Intertextuality come to be?
Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol: I had become increasingly interested in Taylor Swift for a variety of reasons. But when she released her album Folklore, a lot of folks who study 19th century British literature, particularly Romantic literature, became extra interested in Swift because she has a bonus track on Folklore called “The Lakes,” which is a reference to the Lake District in England, the home of some of the key figures of the British Romantic movement, in particular a poet named William Wordsworth. Swift puns on his name in the “The Lakes” when she says, “I’ve come too far to watch some namedropping sleaze/ Tell me what are my words worth.” A lot of Romanticists picked up on that and became interested in it.
I wrote a paper about Swift’s Romanticism arguing that she had finally put a name to some of the impulses that she’d had for quite some time. I delivered that paper at the 19th Century Studies Association Conference, which, at the time was being held virtually because of the COVID pandemic, and I got a lot of good feedback on the paper, including some communications from a woman named Anastasia Klimchinskaya. We met through that conference. She also was interested in writing about Swift. We decided that we wanted to propose this volume to give a lot of folks who are literature scholars, but interested in thinking about Swift through their specialty lens, an opportunity to do so.
What is intertextuality?
Intertextuality is the term that we use in literary studies to describe when a work of literature is deeply engaged with another text, when that other text underlies its construction or defines aspects of its message, whether or not [the original] text is explicitly referenced in the text in question – that’s what we mean by intertextuality. A lot of the essays in the book are about ways of understanding Swift’s songs as owing a big debt to works of literature, whether she explicitly acknowledges those works or not.
The first part of the book is “All the Books Beside Your Bed: Engaging the Literary-Historical Canon.” What are some examples of Swift referencing and evoking the literary canon?
There are many. She really crossed over to popular acclaim with “Love Story,” which is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. That song and other songs also refer to the term, or concept, of the “scarlet letter,” which is a reference to the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. She refers to The Great Gatsby. In her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department, in the title track, she refers to Dylan Thomas, a Welsh poet.
To look closely at the lyrics of her songs is to get a picture of someone who identifies as a reader, and then what often comes of that, especially if you’re a creative person like Swift, is that you also end up identifying as a writer. And one of the things that we found interesting to think about, in addition to or alongside those references to the literary canon, are all the moments in Swift’s work when she refers to the act of writing, to putting pen to ink, to putting it into words of her own. You get a lot of that. I think that that goes hand in hand with her interest in maybe inscribing herself into the literary canon.
Do you have a favorite Swift song?
I love “New Romantics.” I love a lot of her really poppy stuff. I love “Welcome to New York.” I’m a big 1989 and Lover fan. Lover may be one of the least acclaimed of her albums, but I thought it was spectacular. Probably my favorite song is “Invisible String,” which is a Folklore track. I love it for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it strikes me as very literary in all of the ways that I find literature interesting. I often remind my students that there is a link etymologically between the words “text,” like what we would use to describe a book, and “textile.” They both come from the Greek word “to craft.” That even comes up even colloquially when we talk about somebody telling a story as “spinning a yarn.” “Invisible String” leans into that idea that stories are built from threads that connect people, places, and things in often unexpected ways.
Historically, weaving was women’s work. I’m really interested in Swift as a woman writer, and the way in which she conceives of the delicate act of creating a narrative or creating something like a poem, which is what lyrics are as somehow potentially tied to feminist history. “Invisible String” is a beautiful song. The string sounds in the song are beautiful, but I love the sentiment that that’s how our stories get made, and we don’t always recognize that until after the fact.
This is an academic book, but I think it will be of interest to many Swifties. Do you think this book will have crossover appeal beyond academia?
That’s really our hope. It is an academic book, and I think it’s time for Swift to be treated through various academic lenses. And indeed, she is. This book was written with students in mind and with general readers in mind. I don’t think that it’s jargon heavy, although it certainly talks about some complex and interesting literary theoretical concepts. I think it’s readable, and in that sense, it’s a cool introduction to the kind of work that literary studies achieves, just as it’s a cool introduction to the literary dimensions of Swift’s work. So I think that it can function in both ways.
What do you hope readers take away from The Literary Taylor Swift?
My hope is that readers of the book who are literally inclined come to recognize Swift for the quality artist that she is. I think that many of them already do, but I do think that there’s an unfortunate skepticism about somebody who is popular and who is especially popular among young women and girls. We unfortunately live in a society where that association alone can create a vibe that that many would regard as unserious. That’s a problem, and I’m hoping that those who are interested in literature, but maybe haven’t given Swift a look because of those preconceptions, will be able to start to recognize the quality of her writing as a lyricist and poet.
I also hope that the book will get Swifties to look at something through an academic lens, to come, not only to understand it better, but to like it more, to love it better. That’s always been my experience with the literature that I most enjoy, that I’ve always loved, learning more about it, thinking more about it, wondering what others think about it, analyzing its details, thinking about it as a kind of craft, as something tied to expressive history has always made me love that stuff more.
You can watch David’s entire conversation with Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol on our YouTube channel, @360degreesound
