It’s Me, Hi, I’m the Problem

Tom Williams explores the folklore surrounding a pop star’s reputation in Elly McCausland’s “Swifterature: A Love Story.”

By Tom Williams November 9, 2025

• Music

• Literary Criticism

IN “THE FATE OF OPHELIA,” the first track on her new album The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift tells the story of a “pyro” who stops the singer from “drown[ing] in the melancholy,” saving her “heart from the fate of Ophelia.” It’s a catchy track, with hypnotic synth rhythms that are perfectly suited to platforms like Instagram. Unsurprisingly, it quickly spread across the internet after its release in early October. In fact, within a week, the album itself had more than 3.5 million listeners, breaking Adele’s 2015 record for first-week sales and streams. That is an extraordinary number of people listening to a song that features a Shakespearean character so prominently.

This isn’t the first time Swift has made a literary reference in her music. Her 2008 track “Love Story” rewrites Romeo and Juliet, and last year’s album, The Tortured Poets Department, mentions Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Dylan Thomas, among others. This alignment of pop and literature has not gone unnoticed in English departments. Harvard, the University of Iowa, and Baylor University now offer courses that approach the literary through Swift’s music. These schools seem to be banking on using the star’s power to attract students who might otherwise gravitate elsewhere; they assume that, by using Swift to approach fiction and verse, they can encourage some of them to pursue deeper study.

The new book Swifterature: A Love Story; English Literature and Taylor Swift developed out of a similar impulse. Its author, Elly McCausland, is an associate professor at Ghent University in Belgium who has been offering English Literature (Taylor’s Version) since 2023, and the book borrows from her experience teaching it. Over the course of 13 chapters, she touches on the nature of narrative and selfhood, Swift’s style, and her place in the canon, as well as on ecocriticism and issues of feminism and race—familiar topics to those of us who research or teach literature in the university. McCausland’s subtitle, “A Love Story,” hints at the less traditional methodology she employs; indeed, she embraces rather than resists her fan’s-eye view. Swift’s music is a “glittery, heart-shaped lens” that can help “make us into better readers,” she asserts. In the end, Swift’s discography becomes a prism that bends a fan’s enthusiasm toward literary study.

McCausland’s approach is an interesting one, “the result of a massive free association exercise” that seeks to “make historical English […] literature as relevant, accessible, and interesting to as wide an audience as possible, with a little help from my personal passion for the phenomenon that is Taylor Swift.” The result of this approach is that both Swift and McCausland loom large throughout. McCausland’s voice is often conversational, and in the vein of “free association,” she is able to move easily across periods and through both high and low culture. For the majority of the book, McCausland the fan is balanced against McCausland the scholar, though at times the scholar is forced to take charge, and it’s notable when she does.

This blend works well in the chapter on Swift’s place in the canon. McCausland recalls discovering that a student had compared her course to “a cozy book club with the girls” and described how delightful it was to embrace “girlishness and silliness.” The press was less charitable, and McCausland uses the negative reaction she received from journalists and the public to reflect on the role in which women are cast when discussing culture. She points to the uneven ways that men and women who talk about art are treated: men speak with authority while women are dismissed as being too sentimental. “The implication is that women and girls just cannot be trusted with culture,” she writes, because they “become obsessive and emotional.” Given this context, it is hardly surprising that a class on Swift would become controversial.

McCausland treats the controversy as an opportunity, however. Her class was quite open about its object of study and the fact that its participants were fans. The effect was to create “a space where students felt free to express a side of themselves that society had urged them to dismiss or repress.” Asking what encourages this kind of repression leads McCausland to the even thornier problem of who gets to define what English literature is. In exploring this topic, she moves through Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th-century Defence of Poesie, with its justification of imaginary writing; the novels of Samuel Richardson, who was accused, like Swift, of producing low culture for women; and the work of Salman Rushdie, for whom literature’s strength lies in its refusal of sanctity, in order to make the case that literature is always “a contested space,” always open to new entrants. Even John Guillory makes a brief appearance.

McCausland relies on a kind of fan-led scholarship when she discusses issues of interpretation and authorial control. In her view, Swift’s 2017 album Reputation marked the moment when Swift managed both to assert control and to relinquish it at the same time. Avoiding traditional interviews, the singer-songwriter promoted the album primarily through her own social media accounts and even managed to get Vogue to use her personal photographer and accept answers only in writing. At the same time, she packed the music with references to her own life (both the track “Look What You Made Me Do” and its video allude to a feud Kanye West started with her). But, as McCausland points out, the album also invites listeners to hear the music on their own terms, and the track “Call It What You Want” explicitly asks the audience to make sense of it. For an artist whose work is so closely tied to her private life, this was a risky move, but it recognized what was already happening. Swift’s music has always been layered with clues that fans pursue obsessively. Life of a Showgirl’s “Actually Romantic” opens with “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave,” and within days, Reddit was full of speculation about who this line might be referencing. By laying out such tempting breadcrumbs, Swift turns her listeners into interpretive readers who enthusiastically search for meaning in her work.

Such an appetite for meaning-making leads McCausland into the history of literary interpretation. Who, she wonders, has the right to give a text meaning? What follows is a spirited examination of how readers and writers share responsibility. By staying close to Swift as a subject, she brings a fresh energy to questions of authorship and control. After a quick tour of the intentional fallacy and the death of the author, she brings up Swift’s 2014 song “Blank Space” to punningly conclude that “the author is never the ‘actual’ author, but instead our personal projection or idea of them […] risen up from the dead to become a kind of blank space for our wildest dreams—Swift does it all the time.” In moments like this, the instincts of the fan and of the scholar mesh smoothly, bringing breezy insight into thorny theoretical problems.

Yet when Swifterature turns to topics such as race, gender, or the environment, McCausland’s tone cools, the fan in her retreats, and a scholarly mode asserts itself. In a chapter on ecocriticism, McCausland draws our attention to Swift’s imagery of the natural world and how it helps students notice the environment around them and their impact on it. McCausland argues that the forest in the video for “Out of the Woods” works as a “metaphor for emotional difficulty leading to personal growth.” She also points to the 2020 albums folklore and evermore, which, she tells us, embrace a world where humans no longer control the environment. Together, these examples demonstrate Swift’s engagement with ecological issues and causes, though McCausland is careful to contrast this with the musician’s use of private jets, her exploitative merchandizing, and various marketing practices that encourage overconsumption. Swift may write about nature, but she doesn’t do much to preserve it.

The scholar in McCausland is similarly dominant when discussing Swift’s feminism, which she characterizes as white and introverted. She wonders, “What might it look like for Swift […] to reflect more critically on her own position?” It’s notable that, in some of these later chapters, the personal anecdotes that energize earlier sections give way to arguments increasingly framed through quotations from journalists, critics, and scholars. In the process, Swift shifts from embodying a positive example to serving as an ambivalent one—McCausland even describes her, at one point, as a “‘gateway drug’ for feminism and politics” that may ultimately have to be left behind. It is clear that the fan-inflected readings are less useful in these moments because of the tension between what academic and popular cultures will tolerate. I don’t think that this is a flaw in McCausland’s method; rather, it serves to remind us where those cultures diverge, reflecting the negotiations that play out in literature departments when the urge to embrace popular culture clashes with the uncomfortable truth that the academy and the culture it studies don’t always value the same things.

A related tension becomes visible when McCausland tries to explain why the literature she wants her readers to study is valuable. Early in the book, she writes, “I’ve spoken to students hitherto discouraged, perhaps by economically minded family members, from pursuing an apparently worthless humanities degree, whose minds have been made up to pursue their passions.” Here literary study and the humanities in general are cast as “passions,” vocations that should be followed for their own sake. Later, in her discussion of Swift’s elegies (where McCausland skillfully compares her work with that of W. H. Auden and Derek Walcott), literature is given a therapeutic purpose: “In societies where grief and grieving are often shrouded in privacy and even shame, Swift’s public musings on death might prompt us to start important conversations.” Elegy gives language to pain and helps create a community in which it can be shared. Elsewhere, McCausland tells us that literature can productively engage with moral and ethical issues such as climate change, race, and feminism to “help us understand […] the survival and evolution of ourselves—and how we might need to change and adapt to continue enduring in an uncertain future.”

Together, these positions reveal the difficulty of reconciling the study of literature for its own sake with the impulse to study it because it does something for us. McCausland, like many of us, seems trapped within the neoliberal market logic of the contemporary university, trying to hold aesthetic, ethical, and therapeutic claims for literature together. Yet by using Swift to navigate the field and make it “interesting to as wide an audience as possible,” she clearly exposes this problem. As Michael Dango has written for this publication, “speaking the language of the market, we risk, ironically, selling ourselves short.” So, while Swift’s appeal may help improve the reach of English literature, it might also risk fixing the discipline within the same logics that literary studies and the humanities so often try to resist. Maybe Swift’s role here is not to solve the problems we face but rather to embody them: “It’s me, hi / I’m the problem, it’s me.”

And yet, McCausland’s book also investigates what survives beyond these sorts of institutional challenges—that is, the encounter between the reader and a piece of literature. After finishing Swifterature, I found myself remembering what it was like the first time I heard Seamus Heaney read his poem “Postscript” when I was a teenager. The experience gave me goose bumps because it spoke to a vision of the world I’d had but couldn’t name. That feeling belonged to the fan, but the urge to understand what it meant belonged to the scholar. And these impulses can exist together, Swifterature argues. McCausland’s book invites Swift’s fans to follow their curiosity and gives them a map for doing so. This is no small gift. It reminds us that, however we explain the study of literature, there is value in those flashes of recognition when artfully combined words ripple through the world and make everything seem a little sharper, a little more visible, and leave us wanting to know more.