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Lyric Personhood
On the Aesthetics of Being Someone in the West
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Dan Wang
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
A new theory of personhood makes the case that a “person” has always been an aesthetic category, not just a legal, political, or moral one.
What does it mean to be a person? One might think of the possession of certain rights, having the capacity for love, or being self-determined. But if words like “person” or “love” seem to carry an internal meaning, where does this meaningfulness come from? Lyric Personhood contends that to be encultured in the modern West is to learn, on top of everything else, an unspoken and mostly felt sense of what it means to be someone, a sense transmitted not only in language but also through encounters with aesthetic form. Through close readings that span nineteenth-century European opera, commercial cinema, and amateur YouTube proposal videos, Dan Wang shows that a “person” has become an aesthetic concept—and not just a legal, moral, political, or philosophical one—in the last two hundred years of Western culture.
It’s hard to let go of the organizing promise of romantic love, the dream of therapeutic “health,” and the aspiration to belong to national culture, Wang argues, because these longings have been shaped by an archive of sentimental and melodramatic works that trains people's expectations for life, genre, and even the knowing promised in theory itself. Tracing a surprisingly continuous imagination of personhood through opera and film aesthetics, Lyric Personhood introduces modes of reading audiovisual works that allow a longer story to be told about the forms that make personhood sensible in the West.
What does it mean to be a person? One might think of the possession of certain rights, having the capacity for love, or being self-determined. But if words like “person” or “love” seem to carry an internal meaning, where does this meaningfulness come from? Lyric Personhood contends that to be encultured in the modern West is to learn, on top of everything else, an unspoken and mostly felt sense of what it means to be someone, a sense transmitted not only in language but also through encounters with aesthetic form. Through close readings that span nineteenth-century European opera, commercial cinema, and amateur YouTube proposal videos, Dan Wang shows that a “person” has become an aesthetic concept—and not just a legal, moral, political, or philosophical one—in the last two hundred years of Western culture.
It’s hard to let go of the organizing promise of romantic love, the dream of therapeutic “health,” and the aspiration to belong to national culture, Wang argues, because these longings have been shaped by an archive of sentimental and melodramatic works that trains people's expectations for life, genre, and even the knowing promised in theory itself. Tracing a surprisingly continuous imagination of personhood through opera and film aesthetics, Lyric Personhood introduces modes of reading audiovisual works that allow a longer story to be told about the forms that make personhood sensible in the West.
Reviews
“By turns powerful and moving, Lyric Personhood is a profoundly original study of the impact of audiovisual storytelling on identity. This is not just a book about film, opera, or music in screen media; true to its title, this is a book about the role of audiovisual forms in the formation of the self. With satisfying attention to detail, Wang generously unfolds figurations of personhood (the addict, the lover) and situates them in a cultural and historical fabric. Opera, film, and music scholars will read it with interest and pleasure, but it joins the select company of books whose reach is much wider.”
— Christopher Morris, Maynooth University“What if our ideas about personhood are created by music and movies as much as by morality and the law? Wang argues that the category of the ‘person’ is experienced affectively and aesthetically. Lyric Personhood shows how we learn what it feels like to be a person, from Wagner’s operas to post-9/11 melodramas, from speeches in romantic comedies to the music in avant-garde films. Inventive, surprising, and beautifully written, this is a groundbreaking new work.”
— Elisabeth Anker, George Washington UniversityTopics
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
November 19, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9780226843568
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9780226843568
Keywords for this book
musicology; film studies; media studies; aesthetics; form; European opera; film music; affect theory; political theory; epistemology
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
