Barry J. Faulk and Brady Harrison, editors. Teaching Bob Dylan. NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, xiii + 268 pp.
Reviewed by D. Quentin Miller, Suffolk University
I’m writing this review just after seeing A Complete Unknown, the biopic starring Timothée Chalamet about Dylan’s formative years in the Greenwich Village folk scene. I’m wary of reading reviews prior to seeing films, partly because of spoilers and partly because I want to reduce the chance of external bias as I sit down with my popcorn, but in this case I had surveyed some critics because the movie was so hyped. The ones I read ran the gamut, from pans to raves. Now that I’ve seen it, I’ll go back to them to deepen and sharpen my own responses, and maybe to see something I didn’t fully grasp in the moment: in other words, to learn something.
I’ll keep my movie review to myself because my job here is to review an important new book, Teaching Bob Dylan[1], but the film provides useful context for thinking about the topic of teaching Dylan as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, more than fifty years after young Bobby’s debut. I saw the movie with my elder son, a twenty-something who likes Dylan and who loves movies. We talked through our first impressions on the ride home, and he had some questions that I could answer (which album was “It Ain’t Me, Babe” on?) and others that I couldn’t (who was his Black lover with the British accent in that one brief scene…or was she invented for the film)? I had questions that he could answer, too, like where have I seen the actresses who played Suze (called Sylvie in the film upon Dylan’s insistence) and Joan? Facts are checkable, but the discussion became truly interesting when we talked about the film’s artistic choices and how they affected us as two representatives of the multigenerational audience. We agreed that the title A Complete Unknown was appropriate because you don’t feel like you know Dylan any better by the end of the film than you did at the beginning. It’s a matter of debate whether that’s because he’s unknowable even to himself or because he deliberately cultivated mystique as a shield against the fame he both courted and rejected. Whether we’re looking at Dylan’s performances, his lyrics, or his life, he can be regarded as a fascinating and complex classroom text.
The never-ending tension between what can be known and what must be interpreted is part of what makes higher education a joyous pursuit. Once my son and I dealt with the movie’s factual inaccuracies – (son, the infamous Judas exchange didn’t happen at Newport) – we were able to get to the topics that really engage the mind. This, too, is the tension that consumes anyone who has designed a course or course unit on Dylan, and who would thus benefit from a book like Teaching Bob Dylan.
Part of what explains the existence of the journal you’re currently reading is that Dylan has produced so much art for so long that those who think they know him well will always have new contextual directions to take, or connections to make. And those who are just discovering him have a lot of catching up to do. The editors of Teaching Bob Dylan acknowledge this fact in a single-word subtitle: “Multitudes.” This word rightly signals that the book cannot hope to contain Dylan’s multitudes, but we should always be aware that they exist. There are many ways we can approach Dylan in the classroom, the word acknowledges, but no book nor any fourteen-week course of study will ever cover them all. Parallel to what we do with our students in any semester, the book merely introduces the multitudinous Dylan as a classroom subject and invites us to continue the pursuit as we are able. To return once more to the film’s title, “unknown” is a given, but “complete” is impossible. Dylan’s multitudes are fragments.
I asked a few questions as I started to read Teaching Bob Dylan, questions that I think would be useful for you, dear reader, as you decide if it’s a book you want to add to your library. You’ve got an ever-increasing number of books about Bob to choose from, as well as the substantial content of this journal and, of course, articles in the popular press. My questions are: how useful is the book to instructors or would-be instructors? Are the contributors dedicated and innovative teachers? Could the book also be useful to Dylan scholars who are not necessarily interested in teaching a new course or changing the way they teach a current course? Is the volume well written and carefully edited? And finally, and most crucially, does the volume inspire?
Specialized books about pedagogy have a limited audience. That’s a neutral observation, but I want to acknowledge from the get-go that this book is not designed for everyone. I would even argue that it’s not a book for all teachers as I saw very little in these pages that would appeal to our valued colleagues who teach high school. The orientation is toward higher education, even specifically toward undergraduate education. Again, that’s a neutral statement for the benefit of Dylan Review readers who teach secondary school or graduate courses and who might come looking for tips and tricks.
Given that set of caveats, for those of us who teach courses or units on Dylan to undergraduates, Teaching Bob Dylan is a valuable resource. For starters, the book features a wide variety of contexts. I teach a course on Dylan and the Beat Generation, and I was gratified to read two separate and superb essays on that same topic as well as other subjects I might have anticipated (i.e. approaches involving the “old, weird America” and the social revolutions of the 1960s). No book of this type would be complete without those contexts, and they’re covered intelligently and thoroughly. What I didn’t expect were other frames of reference that expanded my way of thinking. I never would have considered teaching Dylan’s gospel/Christian phase before I read Lauren Onkey’s “Teaching the Gospel,” but after reading her clear and persuasive essay, I can’t imagine why I would have sidestepped it. Robert Hurd’s “Romances with Durango: Teaching Dylan’s Encounter with Mexican Culture” also blew my mind because it’s not an obvious approach, but it’s a highly relevant one. As soon as I read each of these essays, I wanted to register for my colleagues’ classes. That’s good teaching! I was also drawn to the section on “Dylan Beyond the Songs.” Essays by Graley Herren (“Teaching Chronicles”) and Leigh H. Edwards (“Bob Dylan and Documentary Film”) made me want to include more of that content in my course. Like many instructors, I use excerpts from Chronicles and clips from a handful of documentaries, but Herren and Edwards provide valuable genre-based readings of these sources rather than treating them as mere framing devices for the songs.
In addition to the introduction, twelve essays, and afterword that comprise the volume, there are also two appendices, one consisting of syllabi provided by the contributors and one consisting of course materials. These appendices take up roughly one-fifth of the entire volume. At first, I thought this was a little excessive, but upon reflection I feel it was a wise decision because it keeps the volume’s focus squarely on pedagogy (more on that later), and it is a treasure trove of possible materials for those who are eager for fresh ideas to revitalize our teaching. Plus, it’s always valuable to see what choices other instructors have made, not only in terms of selection and organization, but in their presentation of material to students. In offering these documents, our colleagues are generously inviting us to steal ideas and lessons, and we should thank them.
It’s evident that all the contributors to this volume are innovative, creative, thoughtful, and dedicated instructors. I applaud the editors for finding contributors whose experience covers the full range of the higher education landscape, from community colleges to Ivy League institutions. The variety of viewpoints speaks again to the “multitudes” of the subtitle. Not every approach will work for every set of students or every institutional setting, so the variety is necessary. There is also variety in the levels of engagement or granularity of detail. We encounter some sophisticated theory (such as “the cognitive-science theory of ‘conceptual blending’” [35] in an essay by Michael Booth) as well as some screenshots of group exercises an instructor worked on with students in class (a map of the Texas-Mexico border and a timeline in an essay by Robert Hurd [150]). Finally, there are significant differences in organization. In addition to the chronological approach many of us take when organizing a course, we see examples of instructors who creatively break that approach, such as Gayle Wald’s nimble description of her course “The World of Bob Dylan” which (as the title indicates) moves around quite freely, or Robert Reginio’s willingness to shuttle between early rock and roll and hip-hop as a way of reframing Dylan for a new generation.
I’m compelled to gush a little more here about the innovation I saw in these pages because I don’t think faculty are rewarded enough for this dimension of our work except (occasionally) by our students. The thought we put into organizing and structuring our classes is often invisible labor. Also, a really good syllabus requires creative thinking and risk-taking despite institutional pressures to make all syllabi boring, quasi-legal documents. I was struck by Graley Herren’s description of “vocation” at his institution. He reports that this concept must be introduced in a first-year seminar such as the one he teaches on Dylan, and that his institution conceives of it in a specific way, “as the intersection in each person’s life where three roads meet: (1) what you love; (2) what you’re good at; and (3) what others need from you” (167). Most instructors would not automatically reach for Dylan given that mandate, but Herren – a creative thinker – makes his case in a most convincing way. By the end of the essay, he interrupts his own analysis to say, “I’m only noticing this now, so I’m eager to get back into the classroom and try out this idea with my next group of FYS students” (174). Clearly this love of the subject – love being one of the three roads that intersect at vocation – is at play here, and it’s the beating heart of this volume in general. As Richard F. Thomas puts it in his moving afterword, “Most [authors of the Classics] are interesting and important, but I don’t feel for them the love I feel for Virgil, Horace, Tacitus – or Dylan – so I simply don’t teach them” (193). This is not to say love need not be critical – this book is not hagiography, and the portrait of Dylan that emerges is definitely “warts and all” – but the contributors’ passion for their subject is evident and infectious.
The question of whether this book is only for instructors is a little vexed. In their introduction (I assume co-authored by the editors, but it’s not explicit) Faulk and Harrison play with an inherent pun in the volume’s title: as instructors we teach courses on Dylan, but the title indicates that Dylan is himself a teacher, and he sometimes expresses “a teacherly frustration with unruly, uncaring students” (7) which might include not only pesky interviewers, but, well, us. By opening up this possibility, the editors suggest that academics – even ones who would claim to be Dylanologists – want to learn from Dylan, which leads us down the road to interpretation as opposed to pure pedagogy. At the end of the book’s “Acknowledgments,” the editors admit, “We’re all wondering what Bob Dylan would think of a book about teaching ‘Bob Dylan’” (xiii). That’s natural. But the volume takes as a given, and consistently reminds readers, that we could never get a straight answer from him: that’s his schtick. That means we’re in the realm of interpretation, which means the volume must spend some time trying to figure out its evasive subject rather than just presenting ways to present him in the classroom. The placing of “Bob Dylan” in quotation marks in the above quotation is a coy acknowledgement that the subject is about as easy to hold as a handful of rain. To return to my point about viewing the movie with my son, there are things we can solidly know but many more things we must argue for, based on the mess of contradictions and slippery evidence that has constituted Dylan’s career.
Even seasoned instructors can’t get away from interpretation, in other words, or the critical impulse; as the editors argue, “if Dylan had never existed, it might have been necessary for rock critics to invent him” (8). Note: not college instructors, but critics, but all of us who teach higher ed are both critics and teachers. Moreover, we get to know our subject better when we teach it, and the insights we arrive at in the classroom often supersede the ones we bring to the classroom. (Raise your hand if you ever assigned a book to students because you were hoping to understand it better, then to write about it). The volume is ostensibly about pedagogy, but some of the essays – you’ll know them when you encounter them, which I hope you do – shade more to the scholarly article side with the practical pedagogy largely saved for the appendices. That’s totally fine, except that I’m concerned that scholars might overlook this volume because they assume it is only designed as a teaching resource. It contains many gem-like insights for critics who do not necessarily teach Dylan to undergrads. In that sense, it may have even broader appeal than the title would indicate. Scholars who never teach Dylan will also benefit from it.
Readers might seek out individual essays in this collection based on their approach to the subject, but the collection also holds together as a coherent volume. I’ve edited a few essay collections and it’s a simple fact that the writing within them will never be uniform. We all have different voices and styles and different relationships with our readers. Editors who aim for uniformity face frustration. That said, all the essays in the collection are strong and clearly written, and they hold together nicely. The organization of the volume, including the pages in the appendices, makes sense to me, although I might have suggested fewer subsections representing broader categories. Five sections for twelve essays seems a bit many, and the one called “Love and Theft” is more abstract and less descriptive than the others. I’m picking nits here: the volume reflects a steady editorial hand but not an overly heavy one, and typos and redundancies are minimal.
What I really hoped for when I picked up this volume was to be inspired, and it certainly delivered on that level. I finished the volume not only with new ideas for my Dylan and the Beats course based on the superb essays by S.E. Gontarski and Paul Haney, but also with a ton of inspiration to develop a host of new courses. As Faulk and Harrison say, “Dylan is not having a cultural moment quite like, say, Taylor Swift,” but he is in the midst of “a number of very good years” beginning with the Nobel Prize for Literature (3). When that award was announced in 2016, the whole world (including its recipient) seemed a bit taken aback, if not shocked. Enough time has passed to try to figure out what it means, not only for Dylan, but for cultural production more generally. Under the guidance of a smart book like Teaching Bob Dylan, and with the help of the younger generation who might register for any number of Dylan-themed courses, I think we’ll figure it out.
[1] As a contributor to this collection, Dylan Review editor Paul Haney recused himself from any involvement in the procuring and editing of this review.
