Freshman Seminar

For the past several decades the American songwriter and singer Bob Dylan (Nobel Prize in Literature, 2016) has transformed our notion of how songs work. He has exploded traditional song forms, expanding the range of popular song, and reinventing our understanding of the human voice. Along the way, he has recalibrated the relationship between “high” culture and “low” culture by integrating into his writing everything from the European classics to rural American blues. In this seminar we will use Dylan’s remarkable work to reflect on the relationship between poetry and song. We will listen carefully to Dylan’s songs and study them in dialogue with the writings of poets on whom he has drawn in his writing—from Shakespeare and Ovid, to Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Keats, Blake, Robert Johnson, and Allen Ginsberg. Students should come prepared to listen and read closely. Two brief writing assignments and an in-class presentation will be required to receive credit. No knowledge of music is required.