Dylan, the Nobel Prize, and the Boundaries of Literature

A continuation of a discussion on a now-deleted thread.

Bob Dylan's 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature is one of the most controversial awards in the history of the Nobel, inspiring strong defenses and criticisms. I'd like to continue this discussion with the benefit of hindsight, and particularly to complicate the blanket dismissals of Dylan as a popstar wrongly awarded the Nobel.

The main objection is of course that Bob Dylan simply falls under the category of music, not literature. This dividing line, however, is very specific to our current zeitgeist. From the Homeric bards, to the Psalmist, the chanted oral tradition behind Beowulf, the Norse scops, the storytelling Japanese biwa players, the Occitan troubadors, Vachel Lindsay's The Congo, Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets' spoken word poetry and slam poetry, the boundaries between literature and music/live performance have often been very blurry. Poetry and song have closely intertwined histories in many cultures; the western and eastern canons are full of works experienced by their original audiences not as books but as live performances.

Second, Bob Dylan was not the first multimedia artist/nontraditional performer to be awarded the Nobel. Dario Fo was much more renowned as a live performer, theatrical director and playwright than as an author in the traditional sense. There is a long tradition of Nobel-winning playwrights (Maeterlinck, Shaw, Hauptmann, Benavente, Pirandello, O'Neill, Fo, Pinter) -- creators of works intended to be consumed not as books but as live performances.

With this in mind, are we still so certain that Dylan's work falls completely outside of "literature?" Especially considering that more than a few Dylan songs are much more akin to spoken word poetry than to traditional pop songs. Dylan is very much rooted in Beat poetry; do we deny that poetry the status of literature because it was often performed live?

Speaking of the Beats, it's important to mention that Dylan isn't a mere moon-spoon-June pop songwriter but someone who brought an unusual amount of literary ambition to popular song.

As Craig Morgan Teicher wrote in a defense of Dylan's Nobel in the New Republic,

Perhaps his greatest technical innovation comes in lengthy tirades like “Desolation Row” and “Idiot Wind,” parades of repeated verse-chorus-verse structures that remind me of nothing so much as the epic poems of Homer. Those poems were cast in rhyming stanzas so they could be transmitted orally over generations before they were written down. Dylan saw a new use for that old form, soldering it to folk- and blues-based music. Homer catalogued the heroes and villains of ancient battles; Dylan does the same with the tropes and myths of his changing times.

I would add that Dylan's lyrical bricolage - drawing from the Bible, Greek mythology, the blues and English ballad tradition, newspaper headlines, Fellini's cinema, Beat poetry, modernist poetry, American history, pop culture references and William Blake -- achieves a density of allusion that can only be described as Joycean.