Dan Wang: Lyric Personhood, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Blurb

"What does it mean to be a person? In the West, we might identify traits like possessing a "voice," having the capacity for love, and being self-determined. But if words like "person," "human," or "love" seem to carry an internal meaning, where does this meaningfulness come from? Dan Wang turns to romantic comedies, action-thrillers, queer melodramas, and opera for answers. Lyric Personhood explores the low-brow aesthetics of the sentimental and the melodramatic in these genres, arguing that a "person" has always been an aesthetic concept, and not just a legal, moral, political, or philosophical one, in the history of European culture since the Enlightenment. Part of the reason this unspoken register of personhood has such enduring force, Wang asserts, is that they do not only exist as language or as ideas but are also encoded into the audiovisual fabric of Western storytelling. In other words, when someone watches a romantic comedy, they are absorbing not only arguments or ideas about love and its place in a life worth living, but also configurations of space and time, sonic phrasings of foreground and background, and other aesthetic patterns that produce a felt sense of what it means to be a fully realized person. Lyric Personhood traces a formal imagination of personhood that threads through opera and film aesthetics, allowing a longer story to be told about the conditions that make personhood imaginable in the West"-- Provided by publisher.