Lyric Personhood: On the Aesthetics of Being Someone in the West
University of Chicago Press, 2025
Cloth: 978-0-226-84355-1 | Paper: 978-0-226-84357-5 | eISBN: 978-0-226-84356-8
Library of Congress Classification ML2054.W 2025
See other books on: Lyric Personhood | Musical theater | Musicals | Persons | West
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Cloth: 978-0-226-84355-1 | Paper: 978-0-226-84357-5 | eISBN: 978-0-226-84356-8
Library of Congress Classification ML2054.W 2025
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC
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 would mean 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 European 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 in what to expect from 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 would mean 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 European 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 in what to expect from 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.
See other books on: Lyric Personhood | Musical theater | Musicals | Persons | West
See other titles from University of Chicago Press
![](https://www.bibliovault.org/thumbs/978-0-226-74325-7-thumb.jpg "The Comedians of the King: "Opéra Comique" and the Bourbon Monarchy on the Eve of Revolution")
