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The singer-songwriter's remarks on how the book "Moby Dick"
influenced him bear a close similarity to the SparkNotes
summaries of the Herman Melville classic novel, according to an
analysis on Slate.com.
SparkNotes.com provides study guides for students in literature
and other fields.
Author Andrea Pitzer, writing on Slate.com on Tuesday, listed
some 20 sentences from the portion of Dylan's lecture on "Moby
Dick" that closely resembled phrases or ideas on the SparkNotes
website on the book.
They included lines from Dylan's online lecture such as "Ahab's
got a wife and child back in Nantucket that he reminisces about
now and then."
The entry from SparkNotes reads "musing on his wife and child
back in Nantucket," Pitzer noted.
Dylan's representatives did not return calls for comment on
Wednesday. Dylan, whose songs include "Blowin' in the Wind,"
"The Times They Are A-Changin" and "Like a Rolling Stone," has
admitted in the past that he draws from other influences.
In a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, he brushed
aside criticism that he plagiarized the work of other artists by
saying: "It's called songwriting. It has to do with melody and
rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything
yours. We all do it."
The media-shy Dylan, 76, delivered his lecture to the Swedish
Academy last week just within the six-month time limit set by
the organization in order for Nobel laureates to receive the 8
million crowns ($900,000) that goes with the prize. He chose not
to attend the annual ceremony and banquet in Stockholm.
"If the Moby Dick portion of his Nobel lecture was indeed
cribbed from SparkNotes, then what is the world to make of it?
Perhaps the use of SparkNotes can be seen as a sendup of the
prestige-prize economy," said Pitzer.
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Peter Cooney)
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