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Survey of Bob Dylan as U.S. Social History
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For class participants to deepen their understanding of the relationship between culture, power, and contemporary history, relate their relevant experiences, and share their thoughts in discussion and writing.
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Bob Dylan’s music offers a crucial key to understanding U.S. traditional popular culture and people’s history. This is because the desires, poetry, and wisdom of the American people (folk) are compressed in their root music (blues, country, gospel, folk), which influenced him deeply. Moreover, given his pivotal cultural impact worldwide, Dylan can be studied as a cultural index of changing contemporary historical conditions from the 1950s to the present. How did Dylan come to embody the tradition of American root music and reflect his times, from the 1950s-60s -- when he came of age and became a seminal figure in the counterculture -- to today, when has been canonized as an icon in the pantheon of American literature and culture? In this class, we will look at Dylan's relationship to his own times and the hidden, often forgotten sources of U.S. traditional popular culture, which shape his work.
Dylan’s songs will serve as our point of departure to explore the Cold War, Beat literature, civil rights struggles, labor movement, New Left, popular urban rebellions, Christianity, American power and ideology. What does Dylan and the old blues and folk songs say about crime, disaster, God, and poverty? What do they teach us about love, faith, hope, and being human? And, not least of all, what is Dylan’s relevance to our own history and culture?
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(The following schedule is provisional and may change)
1 Introduction Bob Dylan and I
2 Between the Ghost of Robert Johnson and the Spectacle of the Super Bowl Commercial Deep Blues vs. Society of the Spectacle
3 The Shadow of "American Dream" Falls on the "House I Live In" Frank Sinatra and the Study of American Civilization
4 Whose Land Is This? I From the Sacred Grand Canyon to the Land of the Dying Cowboy and Hobo
5 Whose Land Is This? II Land of Indigenous Commons "as Long as Grass Grows or Water Runs"
6 How Shall We Overcome I "Aesthetic Dimension" in the Sparks of Direct Action Linking Workers and the Civil Rights Movement
7 How Shall We Overcome II Day of Black Panther and Weatherman Fighting Mr. Jones, Night of Drifters, Hobos, and Outlaws Escaping "This World" of "One Big Prison Yard"
8 An Artist Who Paints His Self-Portrait in the Watchtower and a Worker Who Can't Get Away from the Rebel City Rodriguez, Motown, and the Detroit Working Class
9 Yankee Power Erasing the High Water Mark of Rolling Thunder Hunter S. Thompson on Jimmie Carter on Bob Dylan
10 Infidels Born and Born Again in Union Sundown Evangelical Christianity and Liberation Theology
11 Decline and Fall of Empire Burlesque Singer and Lucky Wilbury Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism Meets 1980s USA
12 Dylan's Late Style Late Edward Said, Dylan's Personal Folk Revival
13 Land Where the Blues Was Born and Dies Alan Lomax, Harry Smith, and the Roots of American Root Music
14 Song and Dance Man in the Age of Trump Dylanology, Trumpism, and Fall of the American Empire
15 Conclusion Radical Side of Bob Dylan and America
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Students are required each week to read/view the assigned materials, write summary/commentary on them, and participate in discussion. In addition, students will write take-home essays.
40% Take-home essay exam 60% Weekly writing assignment and class discussion
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Do the readings/assignments on time.
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Participate fully in class discussion.
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