Dan Wang - "Lyric Personhood" - Daniel Morgan

Dan Wang will discuss his new book "Lyric Personhood: On the Aesthetics of Being Someone in the West." He will be joined in conversation by Daniel Morgan.

At the Seminary Co-op

About the book: 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? "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.

About the author: Dan Wang is assistant professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh. He has contributed articles to The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies and to the journal 19th-Century Music.

About the interlocutor: Daniel Morgan is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is author of Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema and The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera.