Abstract:
Is Bob Dylan a literary writer? Can we interpret him as a literary writer? These are the central questions which hover over the discussion throughout this thesis as a series of aspects critical to Dylan's art are discussed and analysed. What quickly becomes apparent, though, is that the issue is not so much whether Bob Dylan is a literary writer, but rather what is the extent of his literary significance? The analysis, here, involves a close reading of Dylan's text, his lyrics, but the aim of this study is not to prove that Dylan is a poet or that his lyrics are poetry. Rather, emphasis is given to the fact that Dylan is not literary in a traditional sense, but that that in itself does not exclude his work from being so. The very fact that Dylan is a songwriter working in a popular medium imbues his lyrics with an atmosphere and perspective which may be unique in modern literature. By treating Dylan as a songwriter rather than as a poet allows for consideration of how the lyrics are performed on record, which is of course the ultimate expression of Dylan's art. In this sense the process of interpreting Bob Dylan is totally unique from that of any other literary writer.
The thesis begins with a discussion of those lyrics by Dylan which deal specifically with the cyclical process of inspiration. The connections between the style and spontaneous approaches of Dylan and William S Burroughs are then considered, along with a comparative analysis of Dylan's 'Desolation Row' with T S Eliot's pivotal modernist poem, 'The Waste Land'. The thesis concludes with an interpretation of Dylan's 1997 album, Time Out of Mind, a recording which both focuses and redirects many of the crucial aspects of Dylan's art.
