Here's Why Bob Dylan Won the Nobel Prize in Literature Today

[Mark Kohut]

I think the intellectual changes within the  Academy since Engdahl left must be major. Last year's Lit winner was arguably, in her writing, more " revolutionary" as an awardee,  more different in being awarded the Prize than Dylan. 

Christopher Ricks and other major lit crits help make Bobby win. And have you ever seen those 
Two major encyclopedias/concordances to Dylan? Suss out every allusion as we and the wiki do Pynchon. Heavy lit shit stuff. 

Female writers on the rise from the Academy. Last year's winner , Lessing, Munro as second wave feminism came of age judgmentally so to speak. 

And I will add the influence of the sixties seems major. ( argument problem here is so many of an age could not help but be " sixties" so association might not be causation) but I was surprised to hear And read ALice Munro talk of herself as sorta made by the sixties. Doris Lessing's  The Golden Notebook cited when she was awarded. 

And now Dylan. 


Sent from my iPad

> On Oct 13, 2016, at 4:42 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/10/heres-why-bob-dylan-won-nobel-prize-literature-today
> 
> Alex Shepard at New Republic:
> 
> No American has won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 23 years, not since Toni Morrison. And it’s easy to presume that the game is rigged against the United States: In 2008, Horace Engdahl, then the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, went out of his way to dis American literature as a whole....The backlash to Engdahl’s comments was severe....But the criticism changed nothing: Seven Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded since then, and none of them went to Americans. Many in the U.S...think that the Swedish Academy has blackballed American writers.
> 
> Kevin Drum at Mother Jones:
> Call me cynical, but this is the lens through which I judge Bob Dylan's Nobel win. The Academy did indeed feel like their boycott of American literature was starting to look silly, but they still didn't want to award a prize to an actual American writer. So they chose Dylan. No matter what you think of his work, I view this as practically the ultimate snub of American novelists. You think Pynchon and DeLillo and Roth and Oates are great writers? Hah! They're not even up to the standards of a good pop singer.
> 
> And now they can spend another two decades ignoring American writers.
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