Name: Why Bob Dylan Matters
ISBN: 9780062685742

Richard F. Thomas

Why Bob Dylan Matters

Mat Connor

A good book but a misleading title. Richard F Thomas is a Classics professor at Harvard and has taught a course on Dylan for a while. You can read the syllabus here. I wish I could have taken his course when I was in university. His course looks like Dylan 101, so you would expect that Why Bob Dylan Matters would act act as a good general intro, but it's not really interested in that. There are so many Dylan books out there that I was ok with that, but would warn anyone interested that this isn't Dylan 101. 

Thomas is a Classics professor so he is most interested in how Dylan refers and adapts the works of classical authors like Homer, Ovid, and Virgil in his songs. Dylan has been accused of plagiarism at times, but Thomas defends him by arguing that Dylan is working under a long tradition of intertextuality, which according to the Cambridge dictionary stands for "the connections between different works of literature and art, and the meanings that are created by them."

In other words, Dylan is not stealing from these classical poets (or other folk or blues singers), but knowingly borrowing and reworking other works to add new meaning and be in conversation with the past works. I'm mostly on board with Thomas' argument, but I didn't buy his defense why it was fine for Dylan to sue Hootie & the Blowfish for using some of Dylan's lines in "Only Want to be with You." That does seem hypocritical to me based on what Thomas says Dylan is doing with his "borrowing."

Thomas also talks a lot about Transfiguration but that part kind of lost me. My final impression is that Thomas used Dylan's Nobel Prize in Literature win as an opportunity to release this academic book. A more honest title would have been something boring like Ancient Footprints: Intertextuality and Transfiguration in the Works of Bob Dylan but that wouldn't have sold as many copies.

Why Bob Dylan Matters

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