ENG 4934-0001 - Spring 2025 - Gontarski

With the award of the Nobel prize for Literature in 2016, Bob Dylan has been increasingly referred to as poet and songwriter, often in that order. The literary award was not without controversy for any number of reasons, of course, but even before the Nobel award Dylan was often spoken of as a poet, his language and imagery often discussed in poetic terms. Mostly Dylan would resist, deny or deflect such literary connections, but the Nobel committee singled out his work "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” The course begins with attempts to establish what constitutes this “new poetic expression” and to define some key terms in the process, not the least of which are what makes this work “new” and what we mean by the term “literature.” The basic pedagogy, then, is to treat song lyrics as poetic statements in themselves, separate from the music, and then to reunite the resulting analysis with performances in an attempt to establish how the union creates an entity greater than the sum of its parts. We will focus on Dylan and other musicians whose lyrics might be deemed not only poetic but poetry, and we will look at those poets who most influenced Dylan, the Beats who performed their poems to musical accompaniment, mostly jazz, particularly Ginsberg, Kerouac and McClure.