Nick Smart

Nina Goss

Dylan at Play offers a selection of writings that can challenge and engross readers eager for new ways to meet the singularity of Bob Dylan’s work. We have no interest in competing with the almost numberless and ever-increasing quantity of critical and encyclopedic writing on Dylan. Our goal with this collection has been play and not categorizing or defining. We solicited material that might, in sum, create a vision of both reverent scrutiny and mischief. In this collection, you’ll find writers who generally are not already fixtures in the Dylan Criticism industry. Here you’ll meet a webmaster, theologians, a linguist, a poet, a polyglot, scholars and teachers. The writers in this collection have heard Dylan’s art calling to them through their particular frameworks of meaning and expression, and the pieces here are a result of their abilities to find the voices to respond to that call. We hope above all that readers of Dylan at Play will become inspired to invent and play with their own experiences of this artist.

Dylan at Play

Eric Hoffman

Contributions by Alberto Brodesco, James Cody, Andrea Cossu, Anne Margaret Daniel, Jesper Doolard, Nina Goss, Jonathan Hodgers, Jamie Lorentzen, Fahri "z, Nick Smart, and Thad Williamson Bob Dylan is many things to many people. Folk prodigy. Rock poet. Quiet gentleman. Dionysian impresario. Cotton Mather. Stage hog. Each of these Dylan creations comes with its own accessories, including a costume, a hairstyle, a voice, a lyrical register, a metaphysics, an audience, and a library of commentary. Each Bob Dylan joins a collective cast that has made up his persona for over fifty years. No version of Dylan turns out uncomplicated, but the postmillennial manifestation seems peculiarly contrary--a tireless and enterprising antiquarian; a creator of singular texts and sounds through promiscuous poaching; an artist of innovation and uncanny renewal. This is a Dylan of persistent surrender from and engagement with a world he perceives as broken and enduring, addressing us from a past that is lost and yet forever present. Tearing the World Apart participates in the creation of the postmillennial Bob Dylan by exploring three central records of the twenty-first century: "Love and Theft" (2001), Modern Times (2006), and Tempest (2012)--along with the 2003 film Masked and Anonymous, which Dylan helped write and in which he appears as an actor and musical performer. The collection of essays does justice to this difficult Bob Dylan by examining his method and effects through a disparate set of viewpoints. Readers will find a variety of critical contexts and cultural perspectives as well as a range of experiences as members of Dylan's audience. The essays in Tearing the World Apart illuminate, as a prism might, their intransigent subject from enticing and intersecting angles.

Nina Goss

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