Self-Enactment or Self-Disclosure: A Search for Autobiographical References in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan

Abstract

Bob Dylan is a contemporary icon of popular music and culture, one of the most influential Americans of the 20th century and America’s most important “song poet”. At the same time, there is perhaps no living person of whom so much has been written but whose bibliography remains so elusive. Not only this but, as Christophe Lebold writes, “the fundamental gesture behind Dylan’s oeuvre is indeed the permanent construction and deconstruction of himself”. The paper sets out to identify autobiographical influences in Dylan’s lyrics, which span five decades, down to the current “mix of inscrutability, flashed teeth, existential angst and deep sorrow, deadpan humour and dead-on breakdowns”, as a perfectly satisfactory coda to a remarkable half-century of music making.

Keywords

• autobiography
• poetry/lyrics
• songwriting
• identity