UGS 302 Bob Dylan and Social-Historical Imagination 62495 PALAIMA, Thomas G. Short Title: Bob Dylan History Imagination Wr and CD flags Professor Tom Palaima Department: Classics WAG 123 Campus Mail Code: C3400 Office: Waggener 14AA Office Hours: T TH 11-12:30 and by appointment
[email protected] Campus Phone: 471-8837 fax: 471-4111 Dept. 471-5742 Description: Human cultures and societies desire stability and generally aim to perpetuate their existing power structures and values. For this reason critical commentary is often suppressed, marginalized or co-opted. Yet social criticism can also be tolerated in frankly surprising ways within songs and poetic traditions, especially when written by geniuses within epic, lyric, folk and blues traditions. In this course, we will look at the songs written and performed by Bob Dylan and the songs of others that he has chosen to perform in concert for nearly six decades in their social and historical contexts. We will investigate how Dylan makes what is real felt. Dylan from the start omnivorously consumed and assimilated songs, poems, novels, histories, and newspapers, contemporary and past. He has tapped into the songs of traditions as diverse as British, Scottish, Irish, Appalachian, Piedmont and Ozark folk traditions and been influenced by artists as wide-ranging as the Mississippi Sheiks, Huddie William Ledbetter, Martin Carthy, the Stanley Brothers, Blind Willie McTell, Hank Williams, Frank Sinatra, Warren Zevon, Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie. Critic Sean Willentz observes, “Dylan's writing a different kind of art. He...had th[e] ability to...enter into lots of different people's brains and souls and see them in collision.” Absorbing Dylan's songs and what inspired them expands our humanity and develops our capacities for sympathy, empathy and compassion for others.