Alfred University English Professor takes deep dive into Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album in new book

Rob Reginio began listening to Bob Dylan's music when he was young and in the company of his mother, who enjoyed filtering her Dylan through Joan Baez's graceful covers. But just before he started college, Reginio began listening to Dylan's Bootleg Series and to songs that hadn't undergone transformations into gentler versions.

"It was just a revelation," he says.

The raw Dylan turned Reginio, now a professor of English at Alfred University with a fondness for Samuel Beckett and postmodern literary theory, into a lifelong fan and scholar of Dylan's work. Reginio has taught undergraduate classes on Dylan and delivered a 2021 Bergren Forum on Dylan's song "John Wesley Harding" and the album of the same name. That lecture has now grown into Bob Dylan Outisde the Law: The Poetics of John Wesley Harding, a deep post-structuralist dive in the John Wesley Harding album. The book is published by Palgrave MacMillan.

The album John Wesley Harding was released in 1967, whose summer season was known as "The Summer of Love." But Reginio notes that summer was known also as "the long hot summer," as American cities burned, and his response to the sentimental view that John Wesley Harding represents a return to folk roots is, "Not so fast."

"The album has been praised for its folk or archaic tonality, but what Dylan was doing with his lyrics was something else entirely. … These are not simple songs in the least."

As a literary theorist, Reginio finds Dylan's work richly accommodating of post-structuralist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. Describing Kristeva as a philosopher who turned the scientific, objectivist claims of early 20^th century scholars of language upside down, he describes Dylan as a lyricist whose own words suggest multiple meanings, a poet who prefers ambiguities to assertions. Even an album that is supposed to be "a return" to the folk tradition is problematic, he says. Listeners don't encounter the original tradition; they engage rather Dylan's numerous acts of returning.

"Words are always filled with historical meanings," Reginio says, "and that makes language a shifting medium through which we see the world. The songs on John Wesley Harding have shifting meanings too. They're so layered in terms of intertextual references, the words are less about objectivity and more about being enmeshed in history. When we're in this language, we don't own it or use it to signify. We're just borrowing this system of significance for our time on earth."

Along with his interest in the works of Dylan and Samuel Beckett (both of whom won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2016 and 1969 respectively), Reginio has taught classes for Alfred University's Division of English, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, in critical theory, American and European Modernism, Women and Gender Studies, and modern drama, to name only a few areas.

He plans to teach a general education class in the spring that introduces students to Dylan's body of work.

"The students will be non-English majors," he notes, "and they're going to be bringing their studies in psychology, or political science, or history to bear in the course. I'm looking forward to it. You can bring a galaxy of interests to Dylan, and you'll find the music engaging you."