Bob Dylan, Charles Taylor, and Cultural Disintegration
2009; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1556-5068
Autores Tópico(s)Rhetoric and Communication Studies
ResumoWhat do we sacrifice when politics is in motion? The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues that modern society has lost sight of what he calls frameworks or horizons of significance, which help citizens define the demands by which they judge their lives and measure, as it were, their fullness or emptiness. The economic and political consequences of an increasingly globalized, interconnected, and complex world erode to some extent these cultural guidelines. If Taylor represents a philosophical investigation of a society without a guiding framework, the recent albums of Bob Dylan are a phenomenological account of living in such a society. Critic Mikal Gilmore writes that Dylan's recent work depicts a center less time creating a vista of mortal and cultural disintegration. This paper integrates Taylor's work, particularly that found in Sources of the Self and The Ethics of Authenticity, with Dylan's recent albums, Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, Modern Times, and Tell Tale Signs. After outlining Taylor's philosophy, I conduct a thematic analysis of Dylan's lyrics as they relate to Taylor's ideas. I conclude by evaluating their perspectives: are Taylor and Dylan right to be pessimistic about modern society? The benefit of this coupling is twofold: 1) we get two distinct, yet very interrelated perspectives of the potential costs of our changing political world and 2) we can understand these costs from a macro, cultural level perspective as well as a micro, psychological one. Whereas Taylor tells us of a culture characterized by individualism and lacking a common view of the good life, Dylan describes a psyche full of loss, regret, emptiness, and morally ambiguous decisions.
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