Reading Lyrics

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course will study early modern lyric poems and present-day popular song lyrics. The argument of the course is that the same concepts, methods, and modes of attention are indispensable for understanding both. Course meetings will split time between the close analysis and interpretation of, on the one hand, the lyric poems of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, George Herbert, John Donne, Robert Herrick, Anne Bradstreet, and, on the other, the song lyrics of Olivia Rodrigo, Kendrick Lamar, Chappell Roan, Beyonce Knowles, Billie Eilish, SZA, and others selected from the top of the charts and the archive of contemporary popular music. In addition to poems and song lyrics, course readings will include critical texts that model persuasive and charismatic interpretation, define and explain key concepts, and theorize the history of lyric and its relation to music. Students will learn to identify tropes and figures, scan meter, parse syntax, and situate rhyme scheme and other formal features of lyrics in a larger genre system. Together we will practice the indispensable skill of attending closely to complex and finely wrought verbal objects without turning away. We will ask how an intense and sustained attention to detail can contribute to our understanding of these lyric objects’ social and political meanings. Multiple shorter written assignments will give students frequent opportunities to practice analysis and interpretation, while larger assignments will invite creative responses in a range of media. Students should expect to memorize lyrics and be prepared to read and/or sing them out loud. Familiarity with music and music theory is welcome but by no means required.