Topics will vary from semester to semester.

Bob Dylan is the most influential post-War American songwriter and winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature. He is also a figure who has redrawn the boundaries between “high culture” and “popular culture,” and reshaped our understanding of the relationship between verse and song. In this course, we will use Dylan’s work as a touchstone to think about how songs are like poems, and how they are not like poems. We will study theories of poetry and song, from the Middle Ages through the Romantic period, and up to the twentieth-century Avant-Garde. We will read poetry by the medieval troubadours, the Renaissance sonneteers, Blake, Keats, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Whitman, Ginsberg, and Harjo, among others, along with critical essays by recent theorists of lyric. And we will listen to Dylan, together with his musical sources and inspirations. Among the questions we will ask: When does lyric become song? What is the relationship between the “sound” of language (rhyme) and the sound of music? How does rhythm on the page relate to rhythm in the body? What happens to poetry when it leaves the page and becomes performance? How does the personal expression of lyric poetry become political “protest” or social commentary? What is the relationship between national identity and memory, on the one hand, and the sonic and literary traditions that shape collective experience, on the other? How does it feel to be like a rolling stone? Students will be required to write two papers and present their work in class. NO KNOWLEDGE OF MUSIC IS REQUIRED FOR THIS COURSE. Students should have access to Dylan’s recorded output through either Spotify, Apple Music, or some other streaming service, or via CDs or LPs. Poetic texts will be made available as PDFs on bCourses.

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