After a bizarrely tumultuous road to accepting his Nobel Prize in Literature, Bob Dylan finally delivered his required lecture earlier this month. The originality of said speech, however, has now been called into question.
As Slate points out, a hefty number of phrases used throughout Dylan's 27-minute lecture bare a striking resemblance to passages from online learning guide (a lazy students' saviour) SparkNotes.
Writer Andrea Pitzer started her investigation after noticing Dylan paraphrase a portion of Moby-Dick in which a Quaker pacifist priest tells Flask: "Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness."
The phrase doesn't appear in Herman Melville's novel, but it turns out that it does match results from the character list on SparkNotes.
Pitzer continued to dig, turning up plenty of other odd similarities between Dylan's lecture and SparkNotes. Of the 78 sentences Dylan spends discussing Moby-Dick, she claims more than a dozen "closely resemble" passages on SparkNotes.
See a selection of Pitzer's side-by-side comparisons for Slate below.
Of course, this isn't the first time Dylan has borrowed material — his latest album Triplicate hears the singer repurposing classic American songs. See his upcoming tour dates in support of the new record here.
As Slate points out, a hefty number of phrases used throughout Dylan's 27-minute lecture bare a striking resemblance to passages from online learning guide (a lazy students' saviour) SparkNotes.
Writer Andrea Pitzer started her investigation after noticing Dylan paraphrase a portion of Moby-Dick in which a Quaker pacifist priest tells Flask: "Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness."
The phrase doesn't appear in Herman Melville's novel, but it turns out that it does match results from the character list on SparkNotes.
Pitzer continued to dig, turning up plenty of other odd similarities between Dylan's lecture and SparkNotes. Of the 78 sentences Dylan spends discussing Moby-Dick, she claims more than a dozen "closely resemble" passages on SparkNotes.
See a selection of Pitzer's side-by-side comparisons for Slate below.
Of course, this isn't the first time Dylan has borrowed material — his latest album Triplicate hears the singer repurposing classic American songs. See his upcoming tour dates in support of the new record here.
