Last semester, Miles Erdman, an English major at the University of Minnesota, studied the British romantic poets, explicating the classic poetry of Wordsworth and Keats.
This summer, the native of Albert Lea, Minn., will do his analysis through his earbuds.
He's enrolled in "The Literary Bob Dylan," an upper-level English class that the university is offering for the first time.
Although Erdman, 22, considers himself "a huge music nerd," he only knows Dylan as the songwriter of hits covered by Adele ("Make You Feel My Love") and Guns N' Roses ("Knockin' on Heaven's Door").
"I can't say I'm familiar with him," he admitted. "When he won the Nobel Prize [for literature], I thought, 'I need to learn about him' and I figure this is a good way to do it."
Apparently. Dylan's name can now be added to the towering group of philosophers, scientists, writers and theologians that millennial college students don't know much about.
On the first day of class, instructor Katelin Krieg asked her 27 students to introduce themselves by sharing a memory or moving encounter with the music of the former Robert Zimmerman.
While half the students had tales of Dylan-loving dads, tuneful road trips and front-row concert seats, Krieg was startled to discover that fully half of the class drew a blank.