ABSTRACT
Dylan in the 1960s, we have seen, always appears to gain traction by setting himself against his society, his past, his family, his former associates, and his former self. Creatively, this corresponds to an imperative whereby, like Emerson’s poet, he draws impetus from contesting socially invested prescriptions of subjectivity. In this section, I want to probe this further, taking up the idea of aversiveness from Stanley Cavell’s use of the term in an account of traits in Emerson’s thinking that have to do with rejecting conformity. 1 In doing so I will move from a philosophical preamble towards biographical uses of the idea. It might be as well to stress that my motive in doing so is not to take a philosophical detour for its own sake, but to use the idea of the aversive attitude to bring out useful and fundamental connections between the aesthetic, the political, and the existential aspects of Dylan’s subjectivity, as well as between different facets, dimensions and stages of Dylan’s career.
