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Abstract: In this essay I argue that the theoretical ideas of'passionate affinity spaces' (Gee and Hayes) and 'pointing' (Prange and Biesta) may be set in relation to one another to illuminate how educators may respect students as autonomous subjects while also underscoring the importance of the teacher's directing role in the literature classroom. I exemplify how this works by presenting Taylor Swift's album Midnights and Shakespeare's sonnets as complementary collections that may be taught in conversation with each other. The essay includes discussion prompts for use in the classroom.
Keywords: Shakespeare's sonnets, Taylor Swift, affinity spaces, educational pointing, teaching, Midnights, pedagogy of interruption
In this essay I make a case for, and offer practical approaches to, teaching Taylor Swifts album Midnights (2022) and Shakespeare's sonnets (1609) together in the English classroom.1 Shakespeare is often invoked in news and opinion pieces that praise Swifts songwriting (Bate, 2023; Hoby, 2015); online quizzes test peoples ability to distinguish between Swiftian and Shakespearean quotations, blogs and podcasts celebrate the two artists together (Doyle, 2024; McCausland, 2023; Rice, 2021) and various universities co-teach them (Dolan, 2023; Scala, 2022; Short, 2023), yet there remains a dearth of peer-reviewed publications detailing how and why one might teach them together. I aim to remedy this by offering a pedagogically focused comparative analysis of Midnights and the sonnets that is grounded in the theoretical ideas of affinity' and pointing', which come from the work of (respectively) James Paul Gee and Elisabeth R. Hayes, and Klaus Prange and Gert J.J. Biesta. To honour texts that students love outside the bounds of school (i.e., texts for which they feel an affinity) without dishonouring the teacher's act of pointing to texts within the school (i.e., texts which are deemed important in institutional, disciplinary terms) is to celebrate the identities of both student and teacher and to strengthen their collective educational experience.
Teaching Midnights and Shakespeare's sonnets together can help ameliorate the oft-reported difficulties of engaging students with poetry, and particularly with Shakespeare, at the same time as demonstrating to them that popular culture is valued in English and its texts may be illuminated by disciplinary skills and practices more usually focused on canonical texts. The value of teaching canonical literature and pop culture together at school...