Bob Dylan wins Nobel for literature

[AdamSmith]

“...for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

 

In her citation, Sara Danils said that though the choice might seem surprising, “if you look far back, 5000 years, you discover Homer and Sappho. They wrote poetic texts which were meant to be performed, and it’s the same way for Bob Dylan. We still read Homer and Sappho, and we enjoy it.”

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2016/oct/13/nobel-prize-in-literature-2016-liveblog

 

A great recognition of one of the great American artists in our history.

 

The best of his lyrics (that includes many of them) are up there within a hair of the best of Whitman and Dickinson, for me, the highest praise I could have. Before even adding in his musical genius.

 

[AdamSmith]

[MEDIA=dailymotion]x1q9yxr[/MEDIA]

[AdamSmith]

Previous US Nobel laureates in literature

Sinclair Lewis, 1930

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill, 1936

Pearl Buck, 1938

TS Eliot, 1948

William Faulkner, 1949

Ernest Miller Hemingway, 1954

John Steinbeck, 1962

Toni Morrison, 1993

[bigvalboy]

Great post Adam Smith. This is significant...Two thumbs up.

[+ WilliamM]

 

THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGIN' (1964)

 

I saw Joan Baez first (1963) and many times since, but Bob Dylan richly deserves the Novel Prize for Literature. When Dylan was at his best in concert, nobody else came close. His lyrics and music spoke to several generations, still now.

 

Who would have imaged this wonderful day in the early 1960s?

 

Thank you, Stockholm.

[+ purplekow]

I prefer Paul Simon's word artistry, but one cannot dispute the influence Dylan's music has had on many of the finest musicians.

[AdamSmith]

In his 30-minute acceptance speech when he won the MusiCares Person of the Year 2015 award, he gave many great insights into his artistic influences and creative process:

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/read-bob-dylans-complete-riveting-musicares-speech-20150209

[AdamSmith]

In a college seminar on Popular Iconography in Contemporary American Culture, the professor recalled that the great Enlightenment thinker Vico posited that cultures evolve through three stages: gods, then heroes, then mortals.

 

Applying that to the evolution of rock and roll, the prof observed that its gods could be said to be Chuck Berry and Elvis. Then its heroes were the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan. Then several generations of mortals.

[+ Charlie]

It is about time that Literature was recognized as more than just novels, poetry and plays. Now it's time to recognize some great non-fiction writers. In their day, writers like Boswell, Gibbon and Carlyle were recognized as literary masters, although they wrote mostly biography, criticism and history.

[body2body]

Previous US Nobel laureates in literature

Sinclair Lewis, 1930

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill, 1936

Pearl Buck, 1938

TS Eliot, 1948

William Faulkner, 1949

Ernest Miller Hemingway, 1954

John Steinbeck, 1962

Toni Morrison, 1993

Don't forget Saul Bellow 1976.

The BBC's Arts Editor said that this award is a game changer, a turn away from the esoteric, and towards an artist with worldwide influence and recognition.

[AdamSmith]

Don't forget Saul Bellow 1976.

Thank you!

 

The Guardian reporter failed me there.

The BBC's Arts Editor said that this award is a game changer, a turn away from the esoteric, and towards an artist with worldwide influence and recognition.

Yes!

[+ WilliamM]

 

Joan Baez sings Dylan

 

FOREVER YOUNG

 

A good song for today!

[Georgie]

...or they've given up on novelists...

[+ ArVaGuy]

This is wonderful news. Maybe even long overdue.

[marylander1940]

Previous US Nobel laureates in literature

Sinclair Lewis, 1930

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill, 1936

Pearl Buck, 1938

TS Eliot, 1948

William Faulkner, 1949

Ernest Miller Hemingway, 1954

John Steinbeck, 1962

Toni Morrison, 1993

 

9 only? I think it's 14 now with Bob Dylan but I don't know if all of them were born the in US or won the award after immigrating and becoming citizens.

 

American Nobel Laureates in Literature

 

 

 

930 – Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) American writer. Received the 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature “for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters.”

 

 

 

1936 – Eugene Gladstone O’Neill (1888-1953) American writer. Eugene O’Neill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, and Pulitzer Prizes for four of his plays: Beyond the Horizon (1920); Anna Christie (1922); Strange Interlude (1928); and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1957). He won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy.”

 

 

 

1938 – Pearl Buck (1892-1973) Pearl Buck, seudonym for Pearl Walsh née Sydenstricker. American writer. Received the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.”resented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight.”

 

 

 

1948 – Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) British/American writer. T.S. Eliot received the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.”

 

 

1

 

949 – William Faulkner (1897-1962) American writer. Received the 1949 Nobel in Literature “for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.”

 

 

 

1

 

954 – Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899-1961) American writer. Brevity was his specialty. Received the 1954 Nobel in Literature “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”

 

 

1962 – John Steinbeck (1902-1968) American writer. Received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception.”

 

 

1976 – Saul Bellow (1915-2005) American writer. Received the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.”

 

 

 

1978 – Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) Polish/American writer. Received the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature “for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life.”

 

 

 

1980 – Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) Polish/American writer. Received the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature for voicing “man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts.”

 

 

1987 – Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) Russian/American writer. Received the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity.”

 

 

 

 

1992 – Derek Walcott (1930- ) Saint Lucian/American writer. Derek Walcott received the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.”

 

 

 

1993 – Toni Morrison (1931- ) American writer. Received the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature for “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” giving “life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

[mike carey]

TS Elliot was born in St Louis but had renounced his US citizenship before he was awarded the prize. He was a British subject at the time.

[+ Charlie]

Czeslaw Milosz did become an American citizen ten years before he won the Nobel, but he was middle-aged when he first defected to the US, and after the fall of the Communist regime, he went back to Poland and spent much of his time there. Almost everything he wrote was in Polish.

 

Derek Walcott was never an American citizen. His only connection with the US was some teaching at American schools, but he did much more of his teaching in England and Canada.

 

Isaac Bashevis Singer did emigrate from Poland to the US when he was 33, but he continued to write all his works in Yiddish, as he had in Poland.

 

Joseph Brodsky's Nobel was awarded mostly for the work he had written in Russian before coming to the US, but he did become an American citizen, and did eventually become the American Poet Laureate.

[+ Charlie]

If one includes anyone who was an American citizen, one would have to include Thomas Mann, even though he won his Nobel for Literature several years before he emigrated to California, where he became a citizen in 1940.

 

There is also the case of Winston Churchill, who was made an honorary citizen of the US in 1963, ten years after he won the Nobel for Literature in 1953, a rare case of a winner whose works were non-fiction (although professional historians might question that statement).

[body2body]

Given that the committee has opened the field, perhaps we will see a film maker one day like Godard, Scorsese, Ang Lee, Werner Herzog. Alas this broadening of the definition of literature came too late for the Genius of Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, or Akira Kurosawa.

[+ WilliamM]

If one includes anyone who was an American citizen, one would have to include Thomas Mann, even though he won his Nobel for Literature several years before he emigrated to California, where he became a citizen in 1940.

 

Thomas Mann's citation in the Nobel Museum in Stockholm concentrates on "Buddenbrooks" and "The Magic Mountain" as well as his short stories and novella. As you write, he was still a European when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mann and his wife, Katia, spent their last years in Switzerland. There is also a museum in Oslo (Nobel Peace Prize).

 

Katia lived in Switzerland until she died at age 96 in 1980.

[+ quoththeraven]

Czeslaw Milosz did become an American citizen ten years before he won the Nobel, but he was middle-aged when he first defected to the US, and after the fall of the Communist regime, he went back to Poland and spent much of his time there. Almost everything he wrote was in Polish.

 

Derek Walcott was never an American citizen. His only connection with the US was some teaching at American schools, but he did much more of his teaching in England and Canada.

 

Isaac Bashevis Singer did emigrate from Poland to the US when he was 33, but he continued to write all his works in Yiddish, as he had in Poland.

 

Joseph Brodsky's Nobel was awarded mostly for the work he had written in Russian before coming to the US, but he did become an American citizen, and did eventually become the American Poet Laureate.

 

Shouldn't it be based on their citizenship and residence at the time they win the Nobel? Not sure what to do when those are not the same, but I would think citizenship generally trumps residence.

 

This seems to be the basis for other Nobels this year in which award winners are deemed American in news reports based on US residence (and possibly citizenship) even though they are immigrants.

[AdamSmith]

Most intelligent, intense, intensely perceptive commentary I've yet seen on this. By Bill Wyman, the Stones bassist '62-'93.

 

http://www.vulture.com/2016/10/bob-dylans-nobel-prize-is-shocking-and-deserved.html

 

Wyman notes that he in fact made the case for Dylan as Nobel laureate three years ago. Compelling, really extraordinarily insightful meditation on the relations between mass cult and high art:

 

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/opinion/sunday/knock-knock-knockin-on-nobels-door.html?referer=http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/arts/music/bob-dylan-nobel-prize-literature.html?smid=tw-share&_r=2&referer=

[AdamSmith]

From Wyman's Times piece linked above:

 

Still — his doggerel verses are not literature. In the 1950s in America, rock was a mongrel music, created out of the cultures of the downtrodden — people who built their lives around the blues, folk, gospel or country. Electric guitars got involved, and then some leers and hip thrusts. A new postwar generation of youth took notice, and a cultural revolution was born.

 

Mr. Dylan added literature. He was first, of course, a singer of folky loquacity, and a serious student of the music’s antediluvian influences: what the critic Greil Marcus calls “the old, weird America.” To this he wedded the yawp of the Beats and the austere intellectualism of the Symbolists. Drugs didn’t hurt, and passing but pungent imagery shows that Mr. Dylan had absorbed the Bible as well.

 

That disruptive mélange gave us the imagery and power of songs like “Chimes of Freedom” and “Desolation Row,” of “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and “Visions of Johanna,” among scores of others. He has displayed a mastery of everything from the political jeremiad (“It’s Alright, Ma [i’m Only Bleeding])” to the romantic epic (“Tangled Up in Blue”), and lines like “Money doesn’t talk, it swears” show his way with the lancing aperçu. Mr. Dylan is neither a saint nor a moralist. Epic anger and personal petulance erupt out of his lyrics. But so do tender mercies, extravagant and deep love, self-castigation and what turns out to have been no little wisdom.

 

Pop lyrics are corrupted by the writer’s desire for popular acclaim. In fact, the record is clear that — whatever ambition lay in his breast — his is a personality, and his art is of a nature, that makes it difficult to chase popular approval or sanction. Mr. Dylan is no Solzhenitsyn, but he is a figure who genuinely challenges the established order.

 

He was surely the first pop artist to tell his audience things it didn’t want to hear. In 1963, from the dais at a civil rights dinner, he looked with some contempt at the well-dressed crowd and said, “My friends don’t wear suits.” The drama surrounding his lurch into electric music is perhaps overstated; “Like a Rolling Stone” was a huge hit. What’s really radical about the song is its derisive look at his privileged listeners. Mr. Dylan reveled in the comeuppance he saw on the horizon: “You said you’d never compromise” and now “... you stare into the vacuum of his eyes / And ask him do you want to make a deal?”

[AdamSmith]

My Dylan mania parallels what I feel for Chuck Berry. (Hold comparative talent/genius analyses between the two of those for later. Dissertations' worth of stuff.) Chuck's 'Havana Moon' rivals Keats's 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/44475).

 

[+ Charlie]

Shouldn't it be based on their citizenship and residence at the time they win the Nobel? Not sure what to do when those are not the same, but I would think citizenship generally trumps residence.

 

This seems to be the basis for other Nobels this year in which award winners are deemed American in news reports based on US residence (and possibly citizenship) even though they are immigrants.

I'm not sure that the Nobel committee identifies the winners officially by their nationalities--I think that is more of a description by the media, or an assertion of ownership by the nations themselves. I didn't even know that Milosz became an American citizen, since he wrote in Polish, was a major cultural figure in Poland, and a majority of his best known works were written while he was a Polish citizen. Therefore, I wouldn't call him an "American Nobel Prize winner." However, although Singer was born and raised in Poland and wrote all his works in Yiddish, he was an integral part of the Jewish community in America for much of his career, so I would call him an "American winner." I would call Brodsky a "Russian-American winner." I don't see how Walcott could be considered a "St.Lucian-American" on the basis of having taught here, since he was a citizen of St Lucia and received a knighthood from Elizabeth II (Americans are not allowed to accept titles from foreign rulers). My comments about Mann and Churchill were intended to point out the rather silly jingoism involved.