STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP):
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 tosses out a familiar, but surprising candidate: Bob Dylan.
While many music critics agree that Dylan or Robert Zimmerman, as his parents named him is the most profound songwriter in the history of 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."
MIXED MEDIUM.
"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. I think the question would not be whether he deserves (the Nobel Prize) as an honour 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, Virginia - who has nominated Dylan every year since 1996.
The literary value of Dylan's texts are also supported by The Norton Introduction to Literature, a commonly used textbook in American high schools and universities, which includes the lyrics to Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man.
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."
