Dylan’s Literature

Abstract

This chapter describes how Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan is a rock star, or a folk singer, or a pop musician. He is not a writer, neither of fiction nor of poetry or drama. Pop music and literature are as different as painting is different from filmmaking. The chapter then considers how Dylan himself takes on the question of his relation to literature in his Nobel Prize lecture, which has been published in the form of a recording. As a young person in grammar school, he read many great books, and some of them impressed him deeply. He asserts that he engages themes from these books in his own songs. Dylan then adds that songs are made for singing the way Shakespeare's lines are made to be performed onstage.