When the American folk and rock musician Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, the rationale for this decision was questioned around the world (Ball, 2011). The Nobel Prize for Literature is conferred by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, and is regarded as the ultimate accolade in terms of literary achievement. The official judgement of the Nobel Committee was that Dylan should receive the award for \u2018having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition\u2019. The Nobel Committee further suggested that Dylan is a poet in the tradition of the Ancient Greek poets Homer and Sappho, who originally wrote poetic texts which were meant to be performed to music but have become works which are primarily read to be enjoyed, and that Dylan\u2019s work is similarly interchangeable (Thomas, 2017a). Dylan is known to draw particularly on Classical texts in his songwriting, occurring much later in his career compared to his relationship with the Bible (Thomas, 2011:142-145). So, let\u2019s explore the songwriting of Dylan and its connection to the Classics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on 24th<\/sup> May 1941 to a middle class Jewish family in Duluth, Minnesota, USA. In 1960, Dylan dropped out of college at the end of his first year and travelled to New York City, where he began playing folk music in the coffee houses and clubs around Greenwich Village. Dylan\u2019s mentor at this time was Ray Gooch, whose extensive library provided Dylan with the intellectual stimulus of Byron, Shelley, Poe, Faulkner, as well as the classic texts of Thucydides, Suetonius, Tacitus, Pericles and Ovid. This ensured that Dylan\u2019s classical high school education was suitably augmented in his early years, despite his lack of a formal college education, acting as a source of inspiration for his songwriting in later years. Dylan quickly established himself as a gifted musician and songwriter in both folk and rock genres, becoming a powerful influence on 1960\u2019s counterculture. Songs such as \u2018Blowin\u2019 in the Wind\u2019, \u2018Masters of War\u2019 and \u2018The Times They Are a Changin\u2019 were adopted as anthems for the civil rights and anti-war movements, despite Dylan\u2019s denial of an intentional protest agenda (Spitz, 1989:9-206; Thomas, 2017a). Dylan has continued to write songs, record, perform and collaborate to critical acclaim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dylan is renowned for extensive intertextuality in his song writing. Intertextuality can be defined as the deliberate or unintentional shaping of a text\u2019s meaning by another text, either by strategies such as allusion or parody, or by forging interconnections between similar or related works. Intertextuality is therefore a feature of all texts. Intertextuality can be an unconscious phenomenon; a phrase or melody being heard and forgotten about, then later resurfacing. However, a fine line exists between intertextuality and plagiarism, and Dylan has been subject to both descriptions, having been accused of musical plagiarism throughout his career (Jacobi, 2009:76).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dylan is known to incorporate literature of various genres into his song writing, such as his homage to Robert Burns\u2019 1789 lyric \u2018My heart\u2019s in the highlands, gentle and fair\u2019, from the closing track of \u2018Time Out of Mind<\/em>\u2019 (Dylan, 1997; Yaffe, 2009:24).<\/p>\n\n\n\nIntertextuality<\/h2>\n\n\n\n