Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Lyric Personhood: On the Aesthetics of Being Someone in the West

Lyric Personhood: On the Aesthetics of Being Someone in the West

Wang, Dan

Hardcover

Series: Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performa

PhilosophyFilm StudiesMusic Reference

ISBN10: 0226843556
ISBN13: 9780226843551
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Nov 19 2025
Pages: 232
Weight: 1.01
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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.

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