Barry J. Faulk                                   Brady Harrison

Department of English                       Department of English

Florida State University                     University of Montana

bfaulk@fsu.edu                                 brady.harrison@mso.umt.edu

CFP: Dylan's Late Styles

Once a contradiction in terms, the elderly rock star is now a fixture of the rock music scene. Yet amid the growing number of older musicians patronized by aging audiences eager to reconnect with the music of their youth, there remains something singular about the career paths that Bob Dylan has taken in the 21st century. As Greg Tate remarks in his review of Dylan’s Modern Times album--released in 2006, nearly a decade after the late career renaissance represented by his 1997 Grammy-winning album, Time Out of Mind: “Point being, you go see Rolling Stones, P-Funk, EWF, Lou Reed, Bowie, Chaka, or whoever because you want to be reminded how good the good old days really were…(b)ut, and this is the crucial difference, when you put that new Dylan on it's to hear what he’s up for today.” For Tate, late-career Dylan represents a distinct and identifiable aesthetic achievement rooted in the present, creating new reference points for interpretation and demanding new forms of attention from listeners. The familiar topics of heartbreak and lost love are still there but alongside a new, rich seam of reflections on personal mortality and the encroachments of time, with the singer’s world-weary voice serving as a perfect complement to the somber themes.

In other words, Dylan’s late career recordings seem like a new and distinct mode of aesthetic expression. As such, the singer’s post-1997 records answer Edward Said’s description of “late style” composition: work characterized by a willingness to break with established aesthetic norms and challenge audience expectations. In fact, Dylan's "late" phase has lasted so long, and has been marked by such a remarkable productivity in music, art, writing, and more, that we cannot speak of "late style," but rather "late styles.” For all these reasons, Dylan's recent decades offer scholars the opportunity to reconsider, revise, and update Said's theorizing. 

We are looking, for this collection of scholarly work, for essays that describe and explore the structures of Bob Dylan’s “late style”; topics to explore include, but are not limited to, the following:

The temporal boundaries of ‘late Dylan’: how ‘late’ is ‘late’? When does ‘late’ begin; when is

‘late’ early?

Does Dylan’s Late Style begin with Time Out of Mind or somewhere (or somewheres) else?

Comparative studies of late Dylan with other popular artists with longevity

Late style or late styles?

Intertextuality in Late Style Dylan

Late Style in Dylan’s non-musical art and writing

The sonics of late Dylan (sound recording, vocal style, songwriting)

Dylan's Late Style music: Folk? Blues? Americana? Roots? Something else?

Late Style as engagement with, or negation of, (post)modernity

Late Style and authenticity

Late Style as nostalgia, or anti-nostalgia

Late Style and the Institute for Dylan Studies and/or the Bob Dylan Center 

Case studies of how specific recordings engage or express ‘late style’

Late Style and religion/theology

The endless Bootleg Series and Late Style

Performing "Late Style": the Never-ending Tour

Essays that question the value of “Late Style” analysis: is Late Style a projection of our

hope/desire that artists attain a “deeper” wisdom in the fullness of time?

Proposals of 250-500 words due, via email, January 31, 2026