Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

I came across a very interesting article re: Bob Dylan & Nobel Prize. Below is a small excerpt from a long and insightful article in Boulevard.


Excerpt from: Symposium: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in literature
By Adrian Matejka   –   Boulevard  Vol 32

The Nobel committee did the right thing at the right time, reminding us of what is greatest about our poetic tradition and also making the point that our bests days are behind us, just at the moment when we are saddled with the worst fascism that has ever inflicted our land. The committee posed the urgent question of whether literature is restricted to the page, to solitary consumptions, to the academy, and to the establishment, or if it is something more diffuse, blending disturbing art forms and methods of expression, stemming from the energies of the people in a voice that can hardly be captured before it escapes. The conditions of prophecy in which Dylan came into being ceased to exist in the 1960s, as the full impact of the Kennedy assassination, the American government turning upon its own people to carry forward empire’s logic, began becoming manifest, as Dylan well recognized, and as his many retreats (which we also affirmations) of the second half of the 1960s, and really all the decades since then, have amply testified to. There will be no more Dylans: he ended his prophecy by way of the famous motorcycle accident in 1966, leaving us in the lurch, as he should have.