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Posted

Dylan's Nobel Nomination Sparks Debate

1 hour, 52 minutes ago  Entertainment - AP

By MATTIAS KAREN, Associated Press Writer

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a ... Nobel Prize-winning songwriter? It's a question being asked increasingly in literary circles, as the annual debate over who should win the Nobel Prize in literature — to be announced Thursday — tosses out a familiar, but surprising, candidate: Bob Dylan (news).

While many music critics agree that Dylan is among the most profound songwriters in modern music, his repeated nomination for the Nobel Prize has raised a vexing question among literary authorities: Should song lyrics qualify for literature's most prestigious award?

Christopher Ricks, co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University — and an avid Dylan fan who has written scholarly papers on the songwriter's work — said the question is "tricky."

"I don't think there's anybody that uses words better than he does," said Ricks, the author of highly regarded works of literary criticism such as "The Force of Poetry" and "Allusion to the Poets," as well as books on T.S. Eliot, Lord Alfred Tennyson and John Keats.

"But I think his is an art of a mixed medium," Ricks said. "I think the question would not be whether he deserves (the Nobel Prize) as an honor to his art. The question would be whether his art can be described as literature."

It definitely can, said Gordon Ball, an author and literature professor at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Va. — who has nominated Dylan every year since 1996.

"Poetry and music are linked," Ball said. "And Dylan has helped strengthen that relationship, like the troubadours of old."

The Nobel Prize in literature is given out annually by the 18 lifetime members of the 218-year-old Swedish Academy. Candidates can be nominated by members of other literary academies and institutions, literature professors and Nobel laureates.

Each year, the Swedish Academy receives about 350 nominations for about 200 different candidates, which is narrowed down to about five finalists. The winner is announced in October. The finalists, except for the winner, are not revealed for 50 years.

Speculation in the literary world is that the 2004 winner will be a woman, something that has not happened since 1996, when Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska was honored.

Some names emerge time and again, including Lebanese poet Ali Ahmad Said, also known as Adonis, and several women, including Danish poet Inger Christensen, novelists Margaret Atwood of Canada, Algerian Assia Djebar, American Joyce Carol Oates and Britain's Doris Lessing.

Ball said he first nominated Dylan after the writer Allen Ginsberg urged him to do so. Ginsberg, a Beat poet whose literary circle included Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, nominated Dylan in 1996.

"Dylan is a major American bard and minstrel of the 20th century" who deserves the award for his "mighty and universal powers," Ginsberg wrote in his nomination letter, which Ball read to The Associated Press.

The literary value of Dylan's texts are also supported by The Norton Introduction to Literature, a textbook used in American high schools and universities, which includes the lyrics to Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man."

University of Virginia professor Alison Booth, who co-edited the anthology, said she doesn't "have any trouble at all considering (Dylan) for a literary interpretation."

"Literature has historically been defined very broadly," Booth said. "I don't think we're testing some radical limits of literature by putting that in."

Several collections of Dylan's lyrics have also been published as books.

Still, most Nobel watchers say it's unlikely the Swedish Academy — traditionally drawn to novelists and poets who are often out of the mainstream — will expand the scope of the prize to include songwriters.

"If so, it would be in a fit of marvelous free-mindedness," said Svante Weyler, head of one of Sweden's largest publishing houses, Norstedts. "It would be very surprising."

But not entirely unprecedented.

In 1997, the prize went to Italian playwright Dario Fo, whose works also need to be performed to be fully appreciated, some say.

And when Winston Churchill received it in 1953, for his historical and biographical writings, the academy also cited his "brilliant oratory" skills.

While the academy never discusses individual candidates, Carola Hermelin at the academy's Nobel Library said songwriters are not excluded from the prize.

"Song lyrics can be good poetry," she said. "It depends on their literary quality."

But Weyler said he was skeptical about including songwriters.

"Then you're categorizing everything that includes words as literature," he said. "Literature should not have to be read by the author for it to be good."

Posted

Just hyperbole or over exuberance on my part - although he probably participated in many "experiments" in chemistry.

Seriously, he's probably more important than some of the unreadable (IMHO) past literature winners.

Posted

Well, then give it to him for something else - find a category.

huh? what else would he qualify for, chemistry? physics??

Might as well give him the Nobel Peace prize, a much better choice than Arafat....

Posted

Just hyperbole or over exuberance on my part - although he probably participated in many "experiments" in chemistry.

Seriously, he's probably more important than some of the unreadable (IMHO) past literature winners.

Yup, same opinion here, but then with the last few they had a lucky hand, in my opinion - finally some skeptics got their share with Naipaul, Kertesz etc... not only world literature light.

ubu

Posted

This is great news! They're really taking chances lately!

Jelinek is a fantastic writer. I'm not sure if here best days have passed already, but then I'm not familiar wiht much of her latest writings. She has some great novels (two of them were turned into great films, "La pianiste" and "Die Ausgesperrten") and some great plays as well as "Hörspiele". She certainly deserves this honour!

ubu

Posted

Seems like quite a few Germans/ Austrians have one the Nobel... Boll, Grass, Hesse.

Is her German even more idiosyncratic than that of Uwe Johnson or Arno Schmidt?

Posted

Seems like quite a few Germans/ Austrians have one the Nobel... Boll, Grass, Hesse.

Is her German even more idiosyncratic than that of Uwe Johnson or Arno Schmidt?

She's decidedly Austrian. Her language goes back I think to Hölderlin (check "wolken.heim" for that) most. Certainly there's some Thomas Bernhard in there, too, as is of the whole Austrian "lineage" I think (you know, the sort of "subversive canon", Kraus, Musil, Canetti, Bernhard, etc etc). Seems Austria has quite ambigue feelings about her, there even were some scandals... yet Austria still celebrates some nice fellows such as Karl Lueger, the anti-semite mayor of Vienna (address of the University of Vienna "Karl Lueger-Weg"... funny as hell :angry: ), so it's obvious many Austrians should have a problem with authors such as Kraus, Bernhard, or Jelinek. Yet at the same time this "climate" has nurished some of the most fascinating writers of the last decades.

And to come back to your post: I'd not liken here to Schmidt (he's beyond any comparison, I suppose), and I don't really know Johnson, but I guess she's a different cup of tea.

ubu

Posted

Highness ;) -- thanks for that response. And wasn't Arthur Schnitzler Austrian as well.

A big fan of Bernhard. For more on Uwe Johnson, see:

http://www.suhrkamp.de/autoren/johnson/johnsonbio.htm

Sadly, something of a forgotten writer here in "the West", but his novels -- I'm an especially big fan of THE THIRD BOOK ABOUT ACHIM -- are almost forbiddingly complex (ala Butor, Or McElroy).

Thanks Joe. I LOVE Schnitzler, then there's Hofmannsthal, and all the guys even further from the East, Kafka, Roth, Rilke etc etc - I tend to read more of that literature than actual German literature. Also the writers from the very eastern border of the German language as it was before WWII do fascinate me a lot: Celan, Ausländer, Rosenkranz.

I have "Jahrestage" on my shelf since three or four years, but never came around actually reading it... not forgotten here, just postponed... I guess you know how it goes.

ubu

Posted

Great fan of Thomas Bernhardt who should have had a Nobel Prize in his time and would probably have done a Jean-Paul Sartre of that.

I have not read anything by Elfriede Jelinek. Plan to correct that soon.

I am surprised by her resemblance to French actress Isabelle Huppert who played the main part in the film 'The Piano Teacher' that was made from one of her novels.

Posted

Great fan of Thomas Bernhardt who should have had a Nobel Prize in his time and would probably have done a Jean-Paul Sartre of that.

I have not read anything by Elfriede Jelinek. Plan to correct that soon.

I am surprised by her resemblance to French actress Isabelle Huppert who played the main part in the film 'The Piano Teacher' that was made from one of her novels.

Yes indeed! Btw that film was full of loooooong word by word quotes from the book! Certainly one of the best films ever made out of a novel! Huppert is impressive, and she's an intellectual, and a woman, so I guess it wasn't that difficult for her to try and relate to Jelinek way of thinking.

Brownie, read that book for a starter, then try something like "wolken.heim" to see what power of language Jelinek is capable of. If you're in for a play, try "Macht nichts. Kleine Trilogie des Todes".

ubu

Posted

I have tried to read some Jelinek once, I found she writes way too many words and she lost me all the time in her stretched metaphors.

laconic couw :w

her books are NEVER easy to read, some in fact are almost impossible, yet for fans of Bernhard, it shouldn't be a big problem.

Try and see a play by her if you can (oh, I forget, you're living in the eastern dumps :g), I think "Macht nichts" is a fantastic piece of writing, try the book!

ubu

Posted

her books are NEVER easy to read, some in fact are almost impossible

so what's the point of that?

I need a little pause from all this diffimcult writing and read something to relax by. German language writers have a tendency for the more=better, which I have difficulty to fathom. I prefer sentences with a clear noun/verb distribution and without too many Matroschkas popping up all over.

Posted

Then you may read all the "Fräuleinwunder" stuff and add some of the morons reading in Klagenfurt barely able to construct a correct "Nebensatz"... ;)

Seriously: I hear you, but that's just not what I expect. We may simple as that agree to disagree.

Jelinek is a very very intellectual author, for the good and bad of that. I find some of her texts ("wolken.heim" for instance, I mentioned it before) to be as off-putting as they are fascinating, but then her goal is most certainly not to just please. Her novel "Lust" is, for instance, is a terrible book, in what it describes - but that's reality, I guess, with maybe a bit of a twist, but that's perfeclty right again -, as well asin how she does it. But then the "how" is perfectly in sync with the "what" and thus the whole book makes sense, repetition and language and all is merged for one goal, in the end.

Read Bernhard's "Alte Meister" for a few hours of good fun.

ubu

Posted

I need a little pause from all this difficult writing and read something to relax by. German language writers have a tendency for the more=better, which I have difficulty to fathom. I prefer sentences with a clear noun/verb distribution and without too many Matroschkas popping up all over.

John, try Michael Köhlmeier's "Der Unfisch" for a hilarious easy read (by another Austrian). Take care to always turn the book sideways when spilling the beer laughing.

Posted

Take care to always turn the book sideways when spilling the beer laughing.

Why, beer is a nice and tasty cleaning device :lol:

I'm afraid beer works better on CDs than on books ...

which imposes the question: What does couw have more of: Books or CDs?

:lol:

Hope this will not prompt a thread: Show us your library ....

Posted

books on beer, CDs immerged in beer... but now we ought to cut the crap, as the man has already headed for weekend, and we are polite enough not to talk crap about absent persons... How 'bout Mikeweil & Jelinek?

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