Opción B - 3 · Inglés PAU Castilla y León Extraordinaria 2024

OPTION B

WHAT'S A SWIFTPOSIUM? ACADEMICS STUDY A POP STAR'S ENORMOUS INFLUENCE

Taylor Swift — one of America’s most decorated pop stars, whose concerts cause actual seismic activity— is again inspiring academic conferences. Academics in Australia and New Zealand are inviting fellow scholars to participate in a “Swiftposium,” an unconventional conference to be held at the University of Melbourne from Feb. 11 to 13 next year, just days before Swift is due to perform in the city and in Sydney as part of her Eras tour. Academics may participate in person or online, the event’s organizers said.

Scholars participating in the event are invited to submit papers that may deal with: Swift’s impact on social movements such as feminism and LGBTQ+ rights; her influence on political discourse; literary interpretations of the singer’s lyrics; the marketing strategy of the singer; and the “economic impacts” of Swift’s cultural prominence. Interested participants are advised to send in abstracts of their papers within 300 words, and to include their names, affiliations, paper title and short bio by Oct. 31.

The singer’s popularity is making its way into academia. Her songs have inspired a literary course at Ghent University, in Belgium, that uses her lyrics to explore 14th-century texts. In 2021, academics gathered at the University of Oklahoma to assess Swift’s impact on culture and music. And New York-University has revealed they’ll be introducing a course which focuses on the career and cultural impact of the 32-year-old music icon.

The singer-songwriter has been selling out concerts in her Eras tour this year in North America; earning hundreds of millions of dollars; getting an honorary mention by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia for boosting the local economy when she performed there; creating new jobs in newspapers; and inspiring Santa Clara, Calif., to name her as its honorary mayor. Her jump from teen country-pop singer to extremely popular music star is partly due to her recent indie-folk albums, which convinced some music critics to start taking her music more seriously, and the explosion of her social media presence through TikTok. (Fragment adapted from The Washington Post.)

3) CHOOSE a OR b, ONLY ONE CHOICE IS CORRECT ACCORDING TO THE TEXT (1 POINT).