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This chapter demonstrates how Bob Dylan has shown a fondness for narrative both in his songwriting and his public persona, as seen from his self-mythologizing days in Greenwich Village to his memoir, Chronicles. It focuses on how “Love and Theft,”Modern Times, and Tempest continue to reflect Dylan's playful and experimental approach to the organizational framework of narrative, which in its broadest sense refers to the representation of a series of events. The chapter shows Dylan divesting from his work the idea of an autonomous, self-sufficient text, and situating his work in a longitudinal spectrum of literary influences where narratives are suggested laterally throughout an album, as well as historically via the use of preexisting text.

Chaplin’s Modern Times confronted the effects of the Great Depression in a way unique for its socio-economic realism at the time of its mid-1930s making. In examining reception of the movie in the US, UK and France, this essay debunks notions that Hollywood movies were part of some uni-directional current of ‘Americanisation.’ It suggests instead that the differing national receptions reflected local circumstances and their own social, cultural and political identities and preoccupations. A complex transnational text, Hard Times was made by a Hollywood-based Englishman influenced by ideas developed on his world tour of 1931-32. Chaplin’s ‘Little Tramp,’ making what would prove his last film appearance, could therefore be interpreted with differing national contexts as a victim of industrialisation and the Great Depression, an inadvertent radical, a defender of order, or the ultimate survivor.

Instead of reading motion pictures as aesthetic artifacts, this chapter describes the political-aesthetic discourse that surrounds film. With the exception of one of Charlie Chaplin's, it does not undertake readings of individual films, if only because scholars such as Jonathan Auerbach, Jane Gaines, and Miriam Hansen bring much more expertise and insight to that endeavor. The chapter's use of Chaplin, moreover, does not present a reading of an early film, since it is concerned with treating Modern Times (1936), a film whose date of production makes it anything but an early film, as an artwork essay that provides a retrospective commentary on the vanishing prospect of motion pictures as a collective, even global, aesthetic medium. The chapter explores how social activists, psychologists, actors, and filmmakers invoked aesthetic principles to adduce political possibilities from what was heralded as a new, universal art form promising to inaugurate worldwide sensus communis.

This concluding chapter shows that a common view among some observers of the contemporary Dylan, observing the pastiche of half-borrowed melodies and lyrics on both “Love and Theft” and Modern Times and questions that have been raised about the veracity of Chronicles, is that in fact Dylan is simply the consummate “bullshit artist.” However, the chapter rejects the claim that there is nothing coherent or compelling in Dylan's body of work. Writer Sean Wilentz, for instance, have shown that Dylan in fact has a powerful and well-educated mind honed not just by his personal experience but by wide, self-guided reading, particularly in American history.

This chapter discusses how Masked and Anonymous certainly does not mark a peak in Bob Dylan's long artistic journey. Precisely set between “Love and Theft” and Modern Times, however, it is an important key to understanding his commitment and intention in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Also in the film are plenty of what Dylan calls “appropriations” from a large spectrum of sources. Intertextuality is indeed a major attribute of Bob Dylan's work, particularly from “Love and Theft” onward. Masked and Anonymous's references go from the speeches of U.S. presidents to novels, plays, sports books, and religious texts.

This chapter uses violence as the topic of exploration of “Love and Theft” and Modern Times, since the destructive life of humankind has run through Bob Dylan's work and seems a good laboratory for tests of relevance and significance. Violence is a bountiful device for several aesthetic satisfactions: frisson from descriptions of violent acts; psychological tension in the dramatic promise of violent conflict or its avoidance; the relief of a climactic narrative resolution; and the intellectual triumph of explicating the thesis, antithesis, synthesis that will become tomorrow's authoritative version of today's violence. By updating traditional folk themes of crime, corruption, revenge, and impulse with contemporary facts of racist brutality and Cold War terror, Dylan's songs struck listeners as a populist cultural tradition in the service of contemporary events.

By a recurrent logic of inversion, screen comedy makes light of, by bringing to light, the machinations of its own medium. This takes place in a way theorized implicitly by Henri Bergson, in regard to the mechanization of body and language in comedy, and exemplified by classics like Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924), and the oddball metafilmic farce of Helzapoppin! (1940). The essential filmic comedy in each case includes photogrammic in-jokes about the progression of the image file, turned at times to a kind of metafilmic slapstick based on the misrecognized or reversed image. Classic examples are contrasted with the digital manipulations of the later comedy Click (2006) as a measure of the electronic eclipse of photochemical progression.

This chapter combines writings from different parts of Warren's career, describing in detail Warren's community-building and economic experiments, including the Time Store in Cincinnati; Utopia, Ohio; and Modern Times, New York.

This chapter examines how the destruction of the 9/11 incident, the ensuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, and other formidable fires and floods constitute a sort of paralyzing Mississippi River fog upon the currents of this dawning century. Bob Dylan navigates bracingly between this world's mighty opposites, as seen when he produced the album “Love and Theft”, the film Masked and Anonymous, the first volume of his autobiography Chronicles, his interview in Martin Scorsese's film documentary No Direction Home, and the album Modern Times. The chapter also shows how tensions between romantic love and divine love, violence and frivolity, and homelessness and homecoming become more seamlessly joined together even as their contrary parts conspire to break apart.

This chapter traces the history of utopian depictions of surveillance before Nineteen Eighty-Four. It argues that we understand Orwell’s novel better when we see it in terms of a long tradition of such works that have from at leas the time of Thomas More in the 16^th century have represented and critically analysed social structures and processes, as well as their relationships to individuals and groups. Inherently, utopias are speculative, testing out good and bad possibilities for readers (and, later, for film goers), enabling them to contemplate the worlds they inhabit and to think about optional ways of being, both individually and socially. Concentrating on this genre, the chapter suggests, uncovers a focused, historically- and imaginatively rich body of works that present a valuable array of depictions and analyses.

Although universal and language-internal processes have operated to create the structural features Northern Irish English described elsewhere in the book, they were also generated by a combination of external factors unique to this part of the world. Of particular importance is historical linguistic contact between populations induced by various migratory processes, including colonisation. In language contact settings, before any claim can be made about the origins of a particular structural feature or the manner in which it has been learned, it is crucial to establish a number of facts about the contact situation itself. In particular, there is the issue of the so-called ‘founder effect’ (Mufwene 2001: 28-29, 2008: 134-143; Thomason 2001: 93; Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 111). This chapter therefore addresses questions regarding the manner in which language shift spread within the region over time utilizing the models of communication network, dialect geography and language ecology introduced in Chapter 1.

This chapter focuses on how music was important for workers in terms of how they moved their bodies as they engaged in the labor process. Music afforded them the opportunity to enact the movements of workless in the structured alienated way of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936) and more in the swaggering agentic way of John Travolta's walk in the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever (1977). Workers at McTells use songs and jokes, both central to the “Stayin' Alive” culture, to enact production even as they expressed a critique of the way it was structured. The scenes of the two films have important connections with the two main ways in which workers comported themselves as they enacted the Taylorized labor processes of making blinds.