The Swiftie and The Scholar

We did it! One album down, lots to go. Uncle Jerry takes us through alllllll the unifying themes, devices, questions, and more (13 to be exact) of the folklore album as a whole. Thanks for coming on this journey with us!

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Works Cited:

Sonnets from the Portuguese 20: Beloved, my Beloved, when I think – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

*Aurora Leigh: A Norton Critical Edition – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

*Morphology of the Folktale – V. Propp 

*The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales – Bruno Bettelheim

*Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion – Jack Zipes

*Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale – Jack Zipes

*The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales – Jack Zipes 

*The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: A Norton Critical Edition – Jack Zipes 

*Literary Theory: An Introduction – Terry Eagleton

*Witches, Ogres, and the Devil's Daughter: Encounters with Evil in Fairy Tales – Mario Jacoby, Verena Kast, Ingrid Riedel

*Retelling / Rereading: The Fate of Storytelling in Modern Times – Karl Kroeber 

*Linguistic Criticism – Roger Fowler

*From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers – Marina Warner

*No Go, the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock – Marina Warner

[anyone lived in a pretty how town] – e.e. cummings

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird – Wallace Stevens

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Lore & Lyrics

Ulysses – James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

*Slaughter-House Five – Kurt Vonnegut

*The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger

*Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

Hilary Duff is trying to listen to the healthy part of her brain – Los Angeles Times

The Swiftie and The Scholar Grading Matrix

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Well, guys, we’ve really stressed Uncle Jerry out with this one. He went so deep on the folklore album as a whole that this episode focuses mostly on the prologue and how it sets up this new style of storytelling, different from all her previous albums. Hope you enjoy, and we’ll see you back here next week for Part 2!

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Works Cited:

*Starship Troopers – Robert A. Heinlein 

Folklore (Taylor Swift album)

*Shakespeare's Sonnets & Poems – William Shakespeare

*Sonnets from the Portuguese – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

*Astrophil and Stella – Sir Philip Sidney 

Semiotics

The Odyssey – Homer

Beowulf

Dryads

Hulder

Folklore prologue

Daddy – Sylvia Plath

Anecdote of the Jar – Wallace Stevens

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We’ve made it to the end of the folklore road! Join Uncle Jerry and Angela as they discuss this is me trying, where the duo finds some Typical Taylor, ambiguity, paradox, multiple meanings, and so much more. 

Come back for the next two weeks as we wrap-up discussion of the album as a whole.

Works Cited:

Couplets

Heroic couplets

Anaphora

Starship Troopers (1997)

Enjambment

Ellipsis

In medias res

The Odyssey – Homer

Caesura

Why I Write – Joan Didion

Simile

The Swiftie and The Scholar Grading Matrix

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Today we’re covering our penultimate folklore poem with Illicit Affairs. Uncle Jerry finds this song fits perfectly within the category of folklore, and shows us just how Taylor Swift’s use of language showcases the lack of love in this song.

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Works Cited:

Interlocutor

Imperative verb

Dramatic irony

The Book of Jonah

Synecdoche

The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost

Aphorism

Assonance

Alliteration

*The Pleasure of the Text – Roland Barthes

Anaphora

Synesthesia

Sonnet 138 – William Shakespeare

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Did we finally find Uncle Jerry’s least favorite folklore poem? And maybe Angela’s too? In this episode, we dissect Peace from Taylor Swift’s 2020 album, and Uncle Jerry finds many paradoxes and double meanings, while struggling to find a window to crawl through into the narrative. 

Works Cited:

Paradox

Apostrophe

Synecdoche

I Would Die 4 U – Prince

You’ve Got a Friend in Me – Randy Newman

Easy Silence – The Chicks

Two Sleepy People – Fats Waller

Stuck in the Middle With You – Stealers Wheel

You Are My Sunshine – Jimmie Davis 

Standing In The Rain – John Paul Young

Standing In The Rain – Al Green

Standing In The Rain – Electric Light Orchestra

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Buckle up, folks. This is a long one! Invisible String is up next in our folklore canon, and Uncle Jerry showed up PREPARED. He and Angela chat through folktales about the red thread, handfasting ceremonies, and more before diving into the poem. They then get into a long and philosophical conversation about fate and predestination and Forrest Gump.

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Works Cited:

All in green went my love riding – e.e. Cummings

Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman

Red thread of fate

Handfasting

Pope Innocent III and Handfasting

2 Kings 14:21 – 16 as the age of ascension

Epizeuxis

*The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway

Enjambment

Metanarrative

Synecdoche

Goddesses of Fate

Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

Caesura

Forrest Gump – Winston Groom

Forrest Gump (1994)

Design – Robert Frost

Hap – Thomas Hardy

Proverbs 16:33

The Swiftie and The Scholar Grading Matrix

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We have the opening track of folklore for you today! Uncle Jerry and Angela discuss the relatable way Taylor Swift writes about the ruminations about the different lives we never got to live during this discussion of The 1. 

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Works Cited:

The Windhover – Gerard Manley Hopkins

Ellipsis

Caesura

Ernest Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory

Contrafactuality

Sight rhyme or eye rhyme

*The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Trochaic Hexameter

The Swiftie and The Scholar Grading Matrix

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In this episode, we are covering Hoax, the closing track from 2020’s folklore. Uncle Jerry starts out a bit iffy on his feelings about the poem, but talking through it with Angela helps him find extra meaning.

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Works Cited:

Anaphora

Ellipsis

Oxymoron

Polysemy

Parallelism

Paradox

Fatalism

Faithless Love – Linda Ronstadt

i sing of Olaf glad and big – e.e. cummings

To a Mouse – Robert Burns

*Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

To a Louse – Robert Burns

Jonah 3 – Jonah Goes to Nineveh

Synecdoche

Metanarrative

The Lord’s Prayer

The Swiftie and The Scholar Grading Matrix

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Continuing along our folklore journey, this episode covers exile, the collaboration between Taylor Swift and Bon Iver. Uncle Jerry teaches us about different types of exile and how they appear across literature and folk tales. We then dig into the poem and Uncle Jerry admits to Angela that he almost cheated and listened to the song because he was so ready to hear how they spoke over each other. 

Also, ICYMI, we will be finishing the entire folklore album. Stay tuned over the next few weeks as we tackle the remaining tracks and then do a comprehensive overview.

Song discussion starts at 19:12

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Works Cited:

Just Give Me a Reason – Pink ft. Nate Ruess

The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri 

Gilgamesh, Nature, and Civilization

Paradise Lost – John Milton

The Odyssey – Homer

Exile of Ovid

Poems From Exile: Ex Ponto, Book I – Ovid

*Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

*Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky

*Ulysses – James Joyce

*Dubliners – James Joyce

*A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

Polyphony in Contemporary Literature

Dramatic irony

Assonance

Alliteration

Iambic tetrameter

Iambic trimeter

Ballad meter or common measure

Synecdoche

Phaedrus

Epistrophe

The Swiftie and The Scholar Grading Matrix

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We are tackling one of the most underrated tracks from Taylor Swift’s folklore album, epiphany. The poem compares past war tragedies to 2020’s pandemic, and Uncle Jerry uses the poem to teach us about Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory. 

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Works Cited:

Wilfred Owen

Siegfried Sassoon

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner – Randall Jarrell

The Angels at Hamburg – Randall Jarrell

Vignette poems

Rhapsody on a Windy Night – T. S. Eliot

Trochees

Iambs

The Song of Hiawatha – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ernest Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory

*Death in the Afternoon – Ernest Hemingway 

Caesura

Parallelism

Synecdoche

*The Things They Carried: The Classic Work of American Literature on War, Memory, and Storytelling –Tim O'Brien 

*Man's Search for Meaning – Viktor E. Frankl 

Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent – John Milton

The Swiftie and The Scholar Grading Matrix

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