On Bob Dylan’s Nobel speech: sound, medium and genre

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Notes

1. Danius, the first female to hold the position of Permanent Secretary, would later be forced to resign her position as the result of a sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Swedish Academy in 2018. The controversy surrounding her resignation still rages in Sweden at the time of this writing.

2. See, for example, this interview with Jack Kerouac, a luminary in Dylan’s literary pantheon: https://bit.ly/2upnUdz, accessed 12 July 2018.

3. On Dylan’s plagiarism of about 20 lines from SparkNotes, see Kornhaber 2017.

4. To be sure, around the time of the announcement, Danius did indeed refer to the history of performed literature, citing Homer and Sappho explicitly: “If you look back, far back, 2500 years or so, you discover Homer and Sappho, and they wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to, they were meant to be performed, often together with instruments, and it’s the same way with Bob Dylan”. But note Danius’s continuation: “we still read [NB] Homer and Sappho … and we enjoy it, and same thing with Bob Dylan. He can be read, and should be read” (Kreps 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Rings

Steven Rings is a associate professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 2005. His 2013 article “A Foreign Sound to Your Ear: Bob Dylan Performs ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, 1964–2009” received the Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory’s Popular Music Interest Group. His book-in-progress is titled Sounding Bob Dylan: Music in the Imperfect Tense.