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

By (author) Dan Wang

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A new theory of personhood makes the case that a â€œpersonâ€Â has always been anÂ aesthetic category, not just aÂ legal, political, or moral one. Â 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 â€œpersonâ€ or â€œloveâ€ 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 â€œpersonâ€ has become an aesthetic conceptâ€”and not just a legal, moral, political, or philosophical oneâ€”in the last two hundred years of Western culture. Itâ€™s hard to let go of the organizing promise of romantic love, the dream of therapeutic â€œhealth,â€ 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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