Dylan Conference Participants
(In alphabetical order)
Betsy Bowden, Professor of Medieval Literature and Folklore at Rutgers University, Camden, wrote the first critically sophisticated, book-length study in the United States on Bob Dylan’s lyrical works: Performed Literature: Words and Music by Bob Dylan (1982; second edition, 2001). Bowden there insists on the oral-performative texture of the Dylan lyric, yet reads that aspect of it as a source of a telling poetic multiplicity.
Aidan Day's Jokerman: Reading the Lyrics of Bob Dylan (1988) close reads Dylan's lyrics in the light of contemporary critical perspectives, as does a recent essay, “Looking for Nothing: Dylan Now,” in Neil Corcoran's edition of 'Do You Mr Jones?' (2002). Day, Professor of British Literature and Culture at the University of Arhus, Denmark, has also written books on the era and works of the British Romantics (Romanticism, 1996), on Angela Carter's fiction (The Rational Glass, 1998), and on Alfred Tennyson's poetry (Tennyson's Skepticism, 2005).
Michael Denning is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies at Yale University. Along with many scholarly articles, he has written three critically well-received books, Mechanic Accents (1987), The Cultural Front (1997), and the recent Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004). All three take items frequently associated with “popular culture”--why not Dylan’s songs as well?--as evidence of a larger if subterranean US and now global social agon.
Janet Gezari is Lucy Marsh Haskell '19 Professor of English at Connecticut College. She is the author of Charlotte Brontë and Defensive Conduct (1992) and Last Things: Emily Brontë's Poems (forthcoming from Oxford in 2007). A longtime Dylan admirer, she has written about why his lyrics are so good in "Bob Dylan and the Tone Behind the Language" (Southwest Review, 2001).
A former teacher of American literature at Swarthmore College, John Hinchey now serves as a staff writer and an editor for the Ann Arbor Observer magazine. His Like a Complete Unknown (2002), the first volume of a projected critical study of Dylan’s entire oeuvre, unapologetically regards his songs first and foremost as an updated version of American poetry in the tradition of Whitman and Dickinson.
Eric Lott, Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia, authored the award-winning Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993), the title of which Dylan of course cited for the title of his own last album. Lott’s passionately alert, multi-disciplinary interpretations of past American cultural practices in Love and Theft also characterize his depiction of present public-intellectual ones in his latest work, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (2006).
A free-lance journalist publishing in periodicals in the UK, India and the US, Mike Marqusee has written several acclaimed critical books discussing the politics of popular culture in the 1960's, in particular about its effect on (and its being affected by) two crucial, high-profile figures: Muhammad Ali (Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties, 1999) and Bob Dylan. Marqusee's Chimes of Freedom (2003), later updated and retitled Wicked Messenger (2005), suggests that Dylan's mid-1960s songs, far from being merely a rejection of topical protest, display a deeper, more contradictory engagement with politics and the public sphere.
Christopher Ricks is Warren Professor of the Humanities and co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. He is currently Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, England. He has written numerous books and essays on a host of writers and on “the force of poetry” itself. Ricks has consistently trained his considerable scholarly wherewithal on the lyrics of Bob Dylan. He is the author of Dylan's Visions of Sin (2003), about which Rolling Stone said: "Admirers of Dylan know that his lyrics have a special, concentrated power . . . . Ricks's achievement is that he explains word by word, where that power comes from and how it works."
