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Pasts Present: History and Memory in the Songs of Bob Dylan

Anne-Marie Mai — 2023-11-03

Introduktion

Today and Tomorrow and Yesterday, Too

Nina Goss — 2023-11-03

This paper aims to bring Bob Dylan into the growing academic and critical discourses of late style studies and reconsider the conventional narrative of the punctuated decline of Dylan’s genius. However exhilarating and sometimes magisterial Dylan’s post-1960s work may be, it remains a landscape of peaks and valleys shadowed by the earlier work. I argue that we can posit Dylan—partly due to his innovative bricolage composition methods and complex new registers in the post-2000 work—as a champion in the late style arena. Usually focusing on exemplars in music and the plastic arts such as Beethoven, Goya, Monet, and Louise Nevelson, late style critics ranging from Georg Simmel in the 19th century, through Theodor Adorno, Edward Said, Kenneth Clark, and others, insist on a radical reinvention of form in service to late-life consciousness. With a focus on “Mother of Muses” (2020) and “Murder Most Foul” (2020), I hope to show that late Dylan has recast his signature embodiment of other voices and texts into a new historical consciousness that questions both narrative and ethical coherence in our historiographies. Dylan has always been an artist of and for his time and current late Dylan is bringing that identity to a challenging climax.

Oh, Help Me in My Weakness

Robert Reginio — 2023-11-03

Using Walter Benjamin’s analysis of storytelling as a conceptual frame and referring to his ethical adherence to what Max Pensky termed Benjamin’s “melancholy dialectics,” this essay offers a thoroughgoing reading of Bob Dylan’s song “Drifter’s Escape” in order to examine the careful parsing of modes of public address and power Dylan undertakes in the song, and to argue that John Wesley Harding, as a song series, critiques dominant modes of American history telling. There has been a recent turn in Dylan Studies towards considering the songs as interventions in (or even works of) history. Taking this background as an essential turn in the field, especially considering the work the Bob Dylan Archive may enable, this essay argues that it is in temporal indeterminacy that Dylan’s work becomes a powerful expression of the vexations of history and memory in America. By “temporal indeterminacy” I mean to indicate a sense of the present shaped by an overflow of unprocessed (essentially silenced) memories and an almost pathological desire for the closure offered by dreams of historical redemption. Thereby the essay argues that the songs on John Wesley Harding are interventions in the typical modes of American storytelling rather than works of history themselves.

Time slots in Dylan’s Oeuvre

Anne-Marie Mai — 2023-11-03

The dimension of time is important to Dylan in his songs, his song analyses, and his painting. In Norman Raeben’s painting school, Dylan discovered that he could break up the chronology of his artwork and turn time into intervals that open the art of singing in a new way. This paper gives examples of the use of time in Dylan’s song “Red River Shore” (released 2008), in his visual art (especially in the “Corner Flat” watercolor series [2007/2013]) and in his analyses in The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022), especially that of the song “Feel So Good.” I will discuss how Dylan uses “time slots,” i.e. time intervals or time windows, in these works. Often Dylan confronts different intervals of the past, the present, and the future; decisive moments are confronted with longer intervals or time is sliced and shown as divergent images . What do the time slots in Dylan’s art open the way for? An insight into a real now, a special spiritual dimension of existence, a mood, or the experience of something eternal? The paper additionally considers these possibilities through the frame of the oxymoron as a pervasive stylistic figure in Dylan’s artistic universe Dylan scholars.