Bob Dylan Outside the Law: The Poetics of John Wesley Harding

This book argues that the songs on Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding are deeply concerned with the fractures in collective memory and politics contemporary with its composition and recording. The songs are thorough investigations of the ethics of memory in America. Critics and curators frame this song series as a “return to” Dylan’s folk roots and as a “retreat from” the political. Specifically, critics argue that Dylan, on this album, retreats from the explicitly political into the realm of timeless, universal moral concerns (as if these discourses can be so separated). The present book seeks to remedy these oversights and illuminate the reception of Dylan’s songwriting art. The summer of 1967 was understood (by white, middle-class young people) as “The Summer of Love.” For African Americans, 1967 was understood as “The Long, Hot Summer” of racial tension and rioting. Dylan’s aversion to “The Summer of Love” is well documented and John Wesley Harding is understood by critics as yet another step by Dylan away from his audience’s desires. This book examines what the album’s provocation entails; it asserts that the album is a reckoning with the tensions in American memory and history that subtend the explosive “Long, Hot Summer.” The book deploys a method informed by poststructuralism ( especially the work of Jacques Derrida) to a.) dismantle the notion of original and authentic forms and histories to which one can return and b.) explain how this ironic dismantling expresses a deeply felt ethical response to American memory and its discontents. In so doing, the book asks how art can respond to our chaotic and strife-ridden century. Read more