Polyvocal Bob Dylan: Music, Performance, Literature

212 Pages·2019·1.897 MB·English

by  Nduka Otiono, Josh Toth

POLYVOCAL
BOB DYLAN
Music, Performance, Literature
Edited by

NDUKA OTIONO

& JOSH TOTH
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature
Series Editors
Paul Lumsden
City Centre Campus
MacEwan University
Edmonton, AB, Canada
Marco Katz Montiel
Edmonton, AB, Canada
This leading-edge series joins two disciplines in an exploration of how
music and literature confront each other as dissonant antagonists while also
functioning as consonant companions. By establishing a critical connection
between literature and music, this series highlights the interaction between
what we read and hear. Investigating the influence music has on narrative
through history, theory, culture, or global perspectives provides a concrete
framework for a seemingly abstract arena. Titles in the series, both
monographs and edited volumes, explore musical encounters in novels and
poetry, considerations of the ways in which narratives appropriate musical
structures, examinations of musical form and function, and studies of
interactions with sound.
Editorial Advisory Board:
Frances R. Aparicio, Northwestern University, US
Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, US
Barbara Brinson Curiel, Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies,
Humboldt State University, US
Gary Burns, Northern Illinois University, US
Peter Dayan, Word and Music Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Shuhei Hosokawa, International Research Center for Japanese Studies,
Japan
Javier F. León, Latin American Music Center of the Jacobs School of
Music, Indiana University, US
Marilyn G. Miller, Tulane University, US
Robin Moore, University of Texas at Austin, US
Nduka Otiono, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada
Gerry Smyth, Liverpool John Moores University, England
Jesús Tejada, Universitat de València, Spain
Alejandro Ulloa Sanmiguel, Universidad del Valle, Colombia
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15596
Nduka Otiono • Josh Toth
Editors
Polyvocal Bob Dylan
Music, Performance, Literature
Editors
Nduka Otiono Josh Toth
Institute of African Studies MacEwan University
Carleton University Edmonton, AB, Canada
Ottawa, ON, Canada
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature
ISBN 978-3-030-17041-7 ISBN 978-3-030-17042-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17042-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2019
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Cover illustration: Todd Strand / Alamy Stock Photo
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To Idzia Ahmad: Friend, tortured soul poet, and Dylan devotee who
followed his line and succumbed to “the inclement teeth of the weather…”
and
To Jeff Toth: A Dylan fan, a brother,
“a strong foundation / When the winds of changes shift”
A
cknowledgments
These edited collections are always more difficult than, perhaps, they
should be. On some level, to get to the finish line, you need to “pay in
blood”—although, if you’re lucky (or if you play your cards just right),
you “pay in blood, / but not [your] own.” We’ve had some luck in this
regard. So we have some reparations to make. To begin, we’d like to thank
the series editors of Palgrave Studies in Literature and Music (Paul
Lumsden and Marco Katz). They had the vision to get this project off the
ground, and the forbearance to let the two of us manage it. We’d like to
thank, also, the helpful editors at Palgrave (Allie Troyanos and Rachel
Jacobe); the hawkeyed research assistants at MacEwan University (Cassie
Digout) and Carleton University (Bissy Waariyo); and a table-of-contents-
worth of great contributors. At a more personal level, our gratitude goes
also to our families for their support and patience… “If not for you.”
And finally, the debt we all—as editors and contributors—owe to the
enigmatic and polyvocal Bob Dylan, the subject of this book, is
immeasurable.
All Dylan lyrics referenced in this collection, unless otherwise noted,
come from BobDylan.com.
vii
c
ontents
1 Introduction: The Foreign Sounds of Dylan’s Literary Art 1
Josh Toth and Nduka Otiono
Part I Literature and Music 21
2 Restless Epitaphs: Revenance and Dramatic Tension in Bob
Dylan’s Early Narratives 23
Damian A. Carpenter
3 Dylan’s Deixis 51
Charles O. Hartman
4 Not Just Literature: Exploring the Performative
Dimensions of Bob Dylan’s Work 67
Keith Nainby
5 The Complexities of Freedom and Dylan’s Liberation of
the Listener 85
Astrid Franke
ix
x CONTENTS
Part II Performance and Literature 99
6 “Blowin’ in the Wind”: Bob Dylan, Sam Shepard and the
Question of American Identity 101
Katherine Weiss
7 Bob Dylan’s “Westerns”: Border Crossings and the Flight
from “the Domestic” 121
John McCombe
8 “I Don’t Do Sketches from Memory”: Bob Dylan and
Autobiography 141
Emily O. Wittman and Paul R. Wright
9 Beyond Genre: Lyrics, Literature, and the Influence of Bob
Dylan’s Transgressive Creative Imagination 171
Nduka Otiono
Notes on Contributors 199
Index 203
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Foreign Sounds of Dylan’s
Literary Art
Josh Toth and Nduka Otiono
On 13 October 2016, Professor Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the
Swedish Academy, announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature had been
awarded to Bob Dylan. Asked (in the wake of the announcement) if, in
choosing Dylan, the “Swedish Academy [had] widened the horizon of the
Nobel Prize in Literature,” Danius quickly and cleverly compared Dylan
to Sappho and Homer. Both, she notes, wrote poetry so as to perform it;
Dylan’s role as musician is, therefore, in no way inimical to his role as poet.
And yet she goes on to insist that “he can be read and should be read, [for
he] is a great poet of the English tradition” (our emphasis). Let’s not
overlook Danius’ subtle shift in focus here—from celebrating Dylan’s
work as a form of ongoing performance to justifying it as readable text.
Danius (and, by extension, the Swedish Academy en masse) clearly realizes
and accepts that Dylan’s identity as musician, as performer, needs to be
defended. Awarding Dylan the Nobel in literature is not the same as
awarding it to Yeats or Eliot. Dylan isn’t really a poet because he’s really a
J. Toth (*)
MacEwan University, Edmonton, AB, Canada
N. Otiono
Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada
© The Author(s) 2019 1
N. Otiono, J. Toth (eds.), Polyvocal Bob Dylan,
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17042-4_1