Bob Dylan and Other Late Style Encounters: Outliving Life focuses on Bob Dylan’s decades-long late period, and considers other late style virtuosos such as Goya, Yeats, and Louise Bourgeois, to raise the stakes of engaging with age and strong art. Late-style criticism has posited a special potency in artists who have flourished in advanced age: a potency of excess, difficulty, and resistance. This book explores the richness of ‘sensational’ late style across topics such as the temporality of ‘overliving,’ ambiguous immortalities, the ethos of Dylan’s signature collage/bricolage method of composition, and late-style historical consciousness. The book uses Dylan’s ironworks and the unclassifiable 2020 publication, The Philosophy of Modern Song, to illustrate divergence in late-style character. Bob Dylan and Other Late Style Encounters argues for a vital experience of presence in close encounters with strong late art.

Nina Goss, PhD is an adjunct professor at Fordham University, New York. She is co-editor of  and contributor to Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century (2017), and author of Dylan at Play (2011). She has presented and published widely in the U.S. and abroad on Dylan’s work.