“If you want to remember, you better write down the names”: Post-Modern Times and the Post-Now Bob Dylan
“If you want to remember, you better write down the names”:
Post-Modern Times and the Post-Now Bob Dylan
Greil Marcus writes, “Songs move through time, seeking their final form.” With the release of Modern Times in 2006, Bob Dylan’s musical and poetic focus locked in to an ongoing project of obscuring the lines of “now” and “past.” Offering the surface of some sung American present, Dylan’s musical trajectory sends his listeners into a deep American past, sorting the narratives of mask and grin, ballad and haint. How does an imagination of any “post-now” depend upon playing the songs that brought you? What present ghosts are anticipated in Dylan’s lyric? Is that lyric itself “post-final” as it chronicles the nation’s violence, foul and perhaps even fouler? Is anything more “post-now” than Dylan? This panel invites explorations of Dylan’s lyric as a disarrangement of time, its capacity to sound, borrow, and reel.
Please send a one-page abstract of proposed paper before Friday, April 15, to Garin Cycholl at gcycholl@iun.edu .