1. Introduction: The Foreign Sounds of Dylan’s Literary Art
Josh Toth and Nduka Otiono
Part I: Literature and Music
2. Restless Epitaphs: Revenance and Dramatic Tension in Bob Dylan’s Early Narratives
Damian A. Carpenter
3. Dylan's Deixis
Charles O. Hartman
4. Not Just Literature: Exploring the Performative Dimensions of Bob Dylan’s Work
Keith Nainby
5. The Complexities of Freedom and Dylan’s Liberation of the Listener
Astrid Franke
Part II: Performance and Literature
6. “Blowin’ in the Wind”: Bob Dylan, Sam Shepard, and the Question of American Identity
Katherine Weiss
7. Bob Dylan’s “Westerns”: Border Crossings and the Flight from “the Domestic”
John McCombe
8. “I Don’t Do Sketches from Memory”: Bob Dylan and Autobiography
Emily Wittman and Paul R. Wright
9. Beyond Genre: Lyrics, Literature, and the Influence of Bob Dylan’s Transgressive Creative Imagination
Nduka Otiono
Nduka Otiono is Assistant Professor at the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, CA. Along with two volumes of poetry and a collection of short stories, he is co-editor of Camouflage: Best of Contemporary Writing from Nigeria (2006).
Josh Toth is Associate Professor of English at MacEwan University, CA. He is author of The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary (2010) and Stranger America: A Narrative Ethics of Exclusion (2018).
Polyvocal Bob Dylan brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholarly voices to explore the cultural and aesthetic impact of Dylan’s musical and literary production. Significantly distinct in approach, each chapter draws attention to the function and implications of certain aspects of Dylan's work—his tendency to confuse, question, and subvert literary, musical, and performative traditions. Polyvocal Bob Dylan places Dylan’s textual and performative art within andagainst a larger context of cultural and literary studies. In doing so, it invites readers to reassess how Dylan’s Nobel Prize–winning work fits into and challenges traditional conceptions of literature.