株式会社極東書店トップ商品一覧Lyric Personhood: On the Aesthetics of Being Someone in the West.

商品詳細

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

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

・ISBN 978-0-226-84355-1 hard US$ 115.00

¥26,944.- (税込) (※)価格はご注文時の参考価格となります。
納品価格につきましては書籍の入荷時点で確定となります。
版元の原価改定、外国為替の変動等により異なる場合がございますので、予めご了承下さい。

お気に入り
著者・編者Wang, Dan,
シリーズ (Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performance)
出版社 (University of Chicago Press, US)
出版年月2025
ページ数232 pp.
言語ENG
ニュース番号<A04-46140>

解説

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.