ENG 4934 Spring 2022 Gontarski

Dylan Studies (which now has its own Institute and archive located at the University of Tulsa) is at a turning point. Dylan is being taken seriously (Nobel Prize in Literature under his belt) as an artist whose work echoes the depth and breadth of other American Nobel Laurates such as Eugene O’Neil, William Faulkner , Ernest Hemingway and Toni Morrison. The nature of this turning point will be determined by the way the Dylan Archive (a huge unplumbed collection spanning draft manuscripts, studio session recordings, concert recording, and more) is used and will necessitate all sorts of methodologies "proper" to literary study being brought to bear upon Dylan's work. Dylan -- as Beckett once was -- is understood in widely read works like Christopher Ricks' Dylan's Visions of Sin (2003) as a "poet" engaged with the timeless verities of the human experience. Dylan's unique contribution to American literature, politics, and history (through his focus on essential American vexations such as race, as below) are almost completely absent from Dr. Ricks' study, however. This class advances an essential intervention into the typical, well-worn scholarly and popular readings of Dylan's work. Albums like the 1997's Time Out of Mind are crucial: it was with this album that Dylan retooled his songwriting method to incorporate obvious and hidden textual appropriations: the dialectical movement between "riffing" on well-known blues tropes and subtly reincorporating and rearranging language from obscure sources reveals an artist fully immersed in American history, and a songwriter eager to remake the by now cliched version of "Bob Dylan" tied up with broad narratives of the 1960s.

Foci:

Race (including White Supremacy),
Sex (i.e., Gender and Difference),
Religion (i.e., Salvation and Redemption),
Violence (Murder in particular).

This course fulfills the Literature Capstone requirement and meets the Scholarship in Practice (s) requirement for Liberal Studies.