Bob Dylan's Poetics of Place and Displacement

What is it about?

This article explores the emphasis in Bob Dylan's work on memory, place, and displacement. Topics covered include the importance of the city and its projection of the rural, the theme of moving on and its association with accumulated experience, and Dylan's ability to continually reinvent himself. The article closes with a reflection on the album Time Out of Mind (1997) as a distillation of themes of place and displacement that can be found throughout Dylan's work and argues that the work presents a poetics of displacement that cannot shed the pull of place and the desire for homely permanence.

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