In this essay, I reflect on the nexus of elementality and civilizational collapse by juxtaposing two imaginaries of extinction that seem at first very distant from each other—the biblical messianism of Bob Dylan’s songs and the archival impulse of the surviving Mycenaean tablets written in Linear B. The dialogue that I stage between them takes inspiration from an experiment in contemporary art that binds together these disparate textual corpuses. The overarching question that such a dialogue might pose is, what is the conceptual connection between the elements—fire, water, air, earth—and elements in a list? (The presence or absence of “the” is how I will differentiate the two concepts in the course of my discussion.) The etymology of Latin elementa, from which the English elements derives, is uncertain, but the semantic link between the Latin word and the letters of the alphabet, a list in its own right, is so...
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Winter 2025
Research Article|
February 01 2025
Dylanologies of Extinction
Mario Telò
Mario Telò
MARIO TELÒ is Professor of Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon (2016); Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy (2020); Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis: Reading Through Pandemic Times (2023); Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis (2023); Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler (2024); and Roman Comedy Against the Subject (2025).
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Representations (2025) 169 (1): 64–84.
Citation
Mario Telò; Dylanologies of Extinction. Representations 1 February 2025; 169 (1): 64–84. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2025.169.5.64
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