Full Description
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.
Contents
Introduction. Self-Evident
One. Three Speeches Delivered by Colin Firth
Two. White Love: Romantic Comedy, the '90s, and Genre in the Background Three Punch Lines (What's Comedy Doing in Romantic Comedy?)
Musical Montage, or Heterosexual Aesthetics
Revelations of Form: A Reading of You've Got Mail
Three. Metarhythms of the Addict: Tannhäuser in the Compulsion Archive Get Better
Two Concepts of Tragedy
Addiction and the Event of Thought
Silence and World Coda: Audiovisual Aesthetics and the Problem of the Whole
Four. The Soundtrack Is So Cliché: Ambient Westernness After 9/11 Zooming Out, Fading In
USA, the Backstage Musical: The West Wing
Event Without Content: The Happening
Personhood and the Cliché: Non-Stop
Race After the "Postracial" Terrorist Film
Hold Music, General Forms, and the Lyric Ordinary: Kajillionaire
Epilogue. Where Nothing Happens
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
