Fit and Counterfeit: The Emergence of a Documentary Aesthetic

This dissertation recovers modern objectivity’s dependence on devotional “counterfeiting,” a mode of representation left neglected by the fissure of literary, scientific, and religious disciplines. While the early modern “counterfeit” is often read strictly under the sign of dissimulation and self-fashioning, I show how, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, this word also grasped a set of practices for responding to a world marked by religious schism and material iconoclasm. The introduction and core chapters discuss instances of devotional counterfeiting in the work of William Tyndale, John Foxe, John Donne, William Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel, John Milton, and Robert Hooke, who each in their own way attended to what Francis Bacon called “the marks of the creator.” Drawing on the resources of the contrafactum (etymon of the fact and the fake), these readers and writers navigated a dual imperative to be at once accurate and to relate with caritas to the givenness of creation. I read this tension, grasped by the project title, “Fit and Counterfeit,” across both visual and textual materials, attending to mark-making itself. Writing, drawing, and engraving, but also smudging, blotting, redacting, are shown to be the labors of making divinity available to human understanding, of responding to providential evidence, and of recognizing and receiving the other in human and creaturely life. In the final chapter, I cast forward to the twenty-first century to argue that the aesthetic and critical solutions early moderns found to competing imperatives undergird both modern empiricism and the documentary impulses of modern avant-garde poetics./nChapter One, “To Leave Out: Intimating Iconoclasm in Early Modern Devotion,” reconsiders the aesthetic legacy of Reformation iconoclasm by foregrounding its material traces on the pages of devotional books. These marks of erasure, often made in response to doctrinal change, register the ethical and spiritual ambivalence toward historical processes. How, I ask, do these “observant” marks—rather than suppressing the past—place iconoclasm at the center of religious practice and cultivate a new mode of observation? And how do they suggest a revaluation of received accounts of “iconoclastic poetics”? These questions frame the chapter’s turn to John Donne’s poetry and, especially, to his Devotions, which I read as a documentary project. In his attention to the intersection of secular and spiritual time, Donne dutifully cultivates suspicion of the phenomenal traces of iconoclasm. And yet, I argue, he also understands God to be an iconoclastic god—one who, like the blotters of the prayer books, produces a sacred surface from an idol by turning that surface into a palimpsest. Chapter Two, “Procrustes, Hospitality, & the Tyrannical Idea of the Sonnet,” shifts from reading material traces of historical break to pursuing the problem of “fit” in sonnet (and anti-sonnet) discourse. The discussion proceeds from Thomas Campion’s complaint that the Procrustean bed of English prosody enforces “rude rhyme”—an imputation of social impropriety, at best, and violence, at worst, echoed again and again by later sonnet skeptics, from Shakespeare’s eighteenth-century editor George Steevens to Slavoj Žižek. Forced closure, which stretches, cramps, or breaks its subject, is perceived as a threat, I argue, because such “mutilations” enable ideological versatility. This paradox of forced fit expresses the anxieties of “counterfeit” forms—the forgery that threatens social order. And it is echoed in the literature of religious controversy, particularly by those seventeenth-century writers who worry over the “prepossessed imagination” of nonconformist readers of scripture. Traced across these discourses, the trope of Procrustes allows us to see why the English sonnet, in particular, is at once a beloved example of “bad” form and an irresistible resource for establishing an identity against the “barbarous” other—whether that other is cast in terms of the Popish past, the unruly underclass, or continental versifiers. Thus Samuel Daniel’s refutation of the Procrustean complaint, in his “Defense of Rhyme” (1603), at once champions recent English history and anticipates the later seventeenth century’s theorization of “freedom” located in the propriety of the individual’s capacity to work. Procrustes, I argue, figures a failure of hospitality—that imperative, underwritten by a Christian ethos, not just to look at but to look after. Chapter Three, “Almost Nothing But Surface,” returns to a historically bounded scene of reading: in and around London’s Royal Society, the contrafactum reappears in the form-making and -breaking practices of microscopy. Guided by Francis Bacon’s sly revision of scholastic “abstraction,” I trace Robert Hooke’s plunge into the ebb and flow of particulars, showing how it required a subtle negotiation of earlier forms of attention, including those deployed by John Donne. In Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) and A Discourse of Earthquakes (1668), the iconicity of his drawn and engraved depictions of minute animals, plants, and fossils reveal a continuity between the immersive and affective modes of devotional image-making and the ideal of detached, “objective” seeing usually associated with empirical representation in the northern Renaissance. Hooke and his fellow naturalists, I argue, were ever as much engaged with the “paradox of the Cross” as a self-canceling image as the iconoclasts of the sixteenth century./nThe central presupposition of my research is that historical thinking is done through artistic and poetic practices in ways that often elude the disciplinary frames of “history.” “Fit and Counterfeit” traces efforts to engage with a cultural legacy that bears heavily on the shoulders of the present as both a resource and responsibility. Time and again, my chapters encounter a felt necessity to engage both critically and lovingly with received forms and materials—and these efforts to follow and transform, to “counterfeit,” often produce ideological contradictions. The last chapter affirms a continuity between early and late modernity by turning to a very recent experimental poetic project that exemplifies the legacy of a documentary aesthetic in the present. Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems (2016-17) draws on the resources of biomedical science to scale up the experience of silkworms to human understanding in a way that resonates with Robert Hooke’s own practices of documentation and magnification. The dissertation thus concludes by demonstrating the absence of any clean distinction between mending and marring while describing, from a late-modern point of view, the condition of being at once bound and freed by legacies of knowledge practices, naturalizing rhetorics, and laboring bodies by which one cannot hope to go unmarked.

Advisor: Picciotto, Joanna