The Nobel October 13, 2016, was a great day for American art. It was also a special moment in music history. For the first time since 1993, an American won the Nobel Prize in Literature. For the first time ever, a musician won this prestigious award. All of that culminated in the 2016 prizewinner: American musician Bob Dylan. That convergence contributed mightily to the award’s significance. It was, indeed, a great day for American art. The press release from the permanent secretary of the Swedish Acad- emy, Sara Danius, simply states: “The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2016 is awarded to Bob Dylan ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.’” The statement praises both the artist and his uniquely American art form. And it initiated a firestorm of responses, as Ben Sisario, Alexandra Alter, and Sewell Chan’s article for The New York Times indicates: “Mr. Dylan, 75, is the first musician to win the award, and his selection on Thursday is perhaps the most radical choice in a history stretch- ing back to 1901. In choosing a popular musician for the literary world’s highest honor, the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize, dramatically redefined the boundaries of literature, setting off a debate about whether song lyrics have the same artistic value as poetry or novels.” Secretary Danius attempted to get ahead of the story in her remarks to The Guardian’s Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Alison Flood when she stated it was not a “difficult decision” and expressed the academy’s hope that “the news would be received with joy.” The secretary explained: “We’re really giving it to Bob Dylan as a great poet—that’s the reason we awarded him the prize. He’s a great poet in the great English tradition, stretching from Milton and Blake onwards. And he’s a very interesting traditionalist, in a highly original way. Not just the written tradition, but also the oral one not just high literature, but also low literature.” She continued: “I came to realise that we still read Homer and Sappho from ancient Greece, and they were writing 2,500 years ago. They were meant to be performed, often together with instruments, but they have survived, and survived incredibly well, on the book page. We enjoy [their] poetry, and I think Bob Dylan deserves to be read as a poet.” When asked by The New York Times if this decision involved “a broadening in the definition of literature,” Danius replied, “The times they are a-changing, perhaps.”
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