Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan's Road from Minnesota to the World

Description

The young man from Hibbing released Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, and the rest, as they say, is history. Or is it? From his roots in Hibbing, to his rise as a cultural icon in New York, to his prominence on the worldwide stage, Colleen J. Sheehy and Thomas Swiss bring together the most eminent Dylan scholars at work today-as well as people from such farreaching fields as labor history, African American studies, and Japanese studies-to assess Dylan's career, influences, and his global impact on music and culture.

Colleen J. Sheehy is director and CEO of the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota. Her books include Cabinet of Curiosities: Mark Dion and the University as Installation (Minnesota, 2006). Thomas Swiss is professor of culture and teaching at the University of Minnesota. His books include New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories and Rough Cut, a volume of poems.

From Library Journal This new collection of scholarly articles on Bob Dylan proves that there are new angles from which to approach his life, his artistic evolution, and his unmatched influence on music and culture. Dylan is inarguably one of the most dissected and discussed artists, musical or otherwise, of the last half-century, and these 20 distinctive, thoughtful, and erudite essays by, e.g., Greil Marcus and international academics from a variety of disciplines such as linguistics, music theory, and African American studies are all welcome additions. As Sheehy (director & CEO, Plains Art Museum) and Swiss (coeditor, New Media Poetics) explain, the articles here do not attempt to solve the myriad puzzles surrounding Dylan; rather, the book poses familiar questions in a fresh manner. Contributions about how Bobby Zimmerman from rural Minnesota became international cultural icon Bob Dylan, what influences his songwriting, and how his songs are having a global impact will be of strong interest to scholars and fans alike. -Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia