beat poets, Dante and Petrarch, and the Confessions of St Augustine. All this of course establishes Dylan as a major artist. In contrast to these three dominant approaches to Dylan’s work, then, Hampton’s approach consists in exploring how ‘songs are made and how specific literary and musical techniques work to generate particular manifestations of style in song’ (p. 13). This emphasis on ‘style’ is of course from a stylistic viewpoint extremely promising. However, Hampton has a literary-critical rather than a stylistic understanding of ‘style’, seeing it in terms of how ‘artists manipulate different levels or historically defined registers of representation’ (p. 13), and of ‘the conventions that dominate a particular moment’ (p. 16). Despite his emphasis on ‘close analysis’ (p. 9), however, Hampton has disappointingly little to say about how Dylan’s songs really work–as complex linguistic phenomena. Hampton’s focus is primarily on how Dylan relates to other artists, and the trajectory of his analyses is always towards the thematic or meaningful level of the songs. As a consequence, he does not deal in any great depth with how Dylan creates meaningful effects by manipulating the sonic and syntactic levels of language. One important feature of Dylan’s work to which Hampton pays little or no attention, for example, is the way that Dylan manipulates his singing voice in order to create sonic ambiguity: it is very often simply impossible to be sure of what he is singing. For instance, the song ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ (the song to which Hampton devotes the most attention) contains a number of sonically ambiguous lines: does Dylan sing, ‘They never did like mama’s homemade dress, papa’s banquet wasn’t big enough’ (as I always thought) or ‘They never did like mama’s home address, papa’s bank book wasn’t big enough’ (as the official lyrics attest)? My point is that an approach rooted in stylistics rather than the close-analysis tradition of literary criticism would be able to say much more about how Dylan’s songs really work. Hampton’s book, then, is a timely reminder of why Dylan’s work matters, and his approach manages to avoid the usual pitfalls of Dylan criticism. It made me appreciate once more the depth and complexity of Dylan’s oeuvre (which has been the soundtrack to most of my life), and provided me with new insights into many of the songs. It certainly differs from, and is better than, most other work on Dylan. But there is still a book on Dylan to be written from the more fruitful perspective of stylistics.

中文翻译：

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书评：政治英语：语言与政治的衰落

击败诗人但丁和彼特拉克，以及圣奥古斯丁的自白。所有这一切当然将迪伦确立为一位主要艺术家。与迪伦作品的这三种主要方法相比，汉普顿的方法在于探索“歌曲是如何制作的，以及特定的文学和音乐技巧如何在歌曲中产生特定的风格表现形式”（第 13 页）。从风格的角度来看，这种对“风格”的强调当然是非常有前途的。然而，汉普顿对“风格”有一种文学批评而非文体的理解，从“艺术家如何操纵不同层次或历史上定义的再现记录”（第 13 页）和“主导一个特定时刻”（第 16 页）。然而，尽管他强调“仔细分析”（第 9 页），令人失望的是，汉普顿对迪伦的歌曲是如何真正发挥作用的——作为复杂的语言现象——几乎没有什么可说的。汉普顿主要关注迪伦与其他艺术家的关系，他的分析轨迹总是朝向歌曲的主题或意义层面。因此，他没有深入探讨迪伦如何通过操纵语言的声音和句法水平来创造有意义的效果。例如，汉普顿很少或根本不注意迪伦作品的一个重要特征是迪伦操纵他的歌声以制造声音模糊的方式：通常根本不可能确定他在唱什么。例如，歌曲“Tangled Up in Blue”（汉普顿最关注的歌曲）包含许多声音模糊的台词：Dylan 唱歌吗？“他们从来不喜欢妈妈的自制衣服，爸爸的宴会不够大”（我一直以为）或“他们从来不喜欢妈妈的家庭住址，爸爸的银行存折不够大”（官方歌词证明）？我的观点是，一种植根于文体学而不是文学批评的仔细分析传统的方法将能够更多地说明迪伦的歌曲如何真正发挥作用。因此，汉普顿的书及时提醒人们为什么迪伦的工作很重要，他的方法设法避免了迪伦批评的常见陷阱。它让我再次欣赏迪伦作品的深度和复杂性（这是我一生中大部分时间的配乐），并为我提供了对许多歌曲的新见解。它肯定不同于并优于大多数其他关于 Dylan 的作品。