标题：The Traitor and the Stowaway: Persona Construction and the Quest for Cultural Anonymity and Cultural Relevance in the Trajectories of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen
出版社：IASPM - International Association for the Study of Popular Music
摘要：While wide apart in terms of cultural heritage and creative energy, Leonard Cohen and BobDylan offered baby-boomers complementary figures: the (non)protest-singer as prophet andagent provocateur and the troubadour as high priest of the depths of the heart.Approachingpersona as a collaborative text, l propose to analyze how Dylan and Cohen's reception (orrejection) as cultural heroes has influenced the conduct of their career and the development oftheir artistic gesture, leading them to constantly redefine their modes of performance.In thisrespect，Dylan and Cohen's trajectories can be seen as inverted images of each other: theformer spends most of his career in a cultural war against his original position of hyper-relevance, trying to obliterate his own persona and regain a cultural anonymity, while the latter -a poet with no rock credentials- has to struggle his way towards a position of cultural relevanceand turn what was essentially perceived as a literary gesture into a rock statement.Along theway,we will be brought to reflect on personae as sites of tension between industry brandingand artistic autonomy, authenticity and theatricality，pop pleasures and social significance,bringing to the fore a distinction between readerly and writerly personae.
