With the announcement of her new album The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift has appointed herself the chairperson of said department and, in doing so, claims her songwriting is like poetry or literature. In this class, we will explore what this assertion means while digging into the narratives Swift creates about herself and her identity as well as about groups of fictional characters. We will look at the the various references to literature in Swift’s songwriting while considering how both Swift and the authors we are reading interact with their cultural moment as well as with ideas of the past. This class will use Swift’s music and works like Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and poems from Sylvia Plath as an entry point into conversations about feminism, grief and mourning, and the performance of one’s identity.