Don’t think twice, it’s all right
Iconic 75-year-old singer-songwriter Bob Dylan on Thursday became the first American since Toni Morrison, in 1993, to win the Nobel Prize in literature. The honor, for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” stirred reactions nearly as passionate as those that have greeted Dylan’s music through the years. The Gazette asked Jorie Graham (“I can’t wait to hear his acceptance speech — I hope he writes a song”) and other Harvard scholars to share theirs. Jorie Graham, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory His work is prophetic. It addresses openly issues of criminal justice or injustice, poverty, racism, abuse of power. To bring attention to his work now is to invite a whole new generation to listen to his masterful, nuanced rage regarding issues that press on us every bit as violently as they did when he wrote those songs. On a literary level, he continued and enriched the centuries-old...