Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for Literature
Singer songwriter, Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature. The Swedish Academy stated that Dylan won the prize for "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Dylan is the first American to win the prize since 1993 when it went to novelist Toni Morrison. While the prize has…
https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico
The Reader's Room
Tracy S #

I’m still trying to reconcile this in my mind. Perhaps there should be a Nobel Prize for music? And: why not Paul McCartney?

Yet, Dylan’s poetry has stood out as a vehicle for change. I still need to think about this.

Mark DiSalvo #

Dylan is our society’s Shakespeare. Both wrote poetry to be performed for the ear. Bob set it to music, Will set it on the stage. Both had true generational influence. It is a deserved recognition. Good for the Nobel Committee…the times they are a changin’.

I’m not that surprised. The Nobel panel has always made unpopular choices.

Tolstoy, Chekhov, Borges, or Faust didn’t win the Nobel because of a myriad of reasons, though they were among the best of their generations. Instead, some lesser known authors tend to always win the prize, adding to the fact that Nobel panel was biased as hell in the past: Harry Martinson and Eyvind Johnson (two Swedes!) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the same year – 1974. That year Gunnar Myrdal, another Swede, also won the prize for Economics. 🙂

I feel very conflicted. I love Bob Dylan and think he is an amazing songwriter. However, I don’t necessarily agree with him winning the prize. Perhaps I’m being too rigid about categories since I have a hard time conceptualizing his songwriting as literature. To me his lyrics and music go together hand in hand and shouldn’t be separated because they lose some of their power when separated. As such, I think Dylan should be recognized but as a musical genius (encompassing both music and lyrics) rather than as a literary figure. While I agree with people like Mark (above) who cite his intergenerational influence and his cultural influence but I don’t think his songs have quite the literary value that are seen in other poets who have won (Pablo Neruda, Yeats, Tagore, Muller, etc.

So I believe Dylan deserves accolades and recognition, but I am not convinced that should be in the form of a Nobel for literature.

I think it’s great that songwriting has been recognised as a literary form. Most of the music I truly love is strong lyrically. As Mark DiSalvo said above, there are poetic traditions where the words are composed to be heard and Bob Dylan is in that tradition. I don’t like everything Dylan has done and I don’t listen to him regularly, but he is important in music history because of that tradition of writing poetry to be heard. I think we get hung up on literature being something written in a book.