In case you wondered …

… What Bob Dylan Means to Literature, and to Song | Intercollegiate Studies Institute: Educating for Liberty. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In the debate that has unfolded since the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Dylan, there has been surprisingly little attention to the way Dylan’s achievement initiated a new range of possibility for songwriting. And there has been hardly any discussion of how this change brought real artistic costs alongside the obvious benefits. We have reason to continue to worry about these costs, given their connection to certain corrosive cultural trends of democratization and sophist-tication. Such worries are probably lurking behind a good deal of the resistance to the prize that has been expressed.