Name: Lyric Personhood. On the Aesthetics of Being Someone in the West
Price: 5704.00 TWD
Availability: InStock
Author: Dan Wang
ISBN: 9780226843551

portada Lyric Personhood. On the Aesthetics of Being Someone in the West

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

Type

Physical Book

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Author

Dan Wang

Collection

Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performance

Year

2025

Pages

232

Format

Hardcover

Dimensions

22.90 x 15.20 cm

ISBN13

9780226843551

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

Dan Wang (Author) · University of Chicago Press · Hardcover

New Book Imported to Taiwan

Delivery: 16 Sep - 29 Sep

NT$ 5,704

NT$ 5,704

Add to Wishlist

Synopsis "Lyric Personhood. On the Aesthetics of Being Someone in the West"

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.