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Abstract
This study examines the evolution of “fidelity” as a technological, aesthetic, and cultural concept beginning in the late nineteenth century and extending to the present. Through an interdisciplinary analysis based on media and sound studies, translation theory, information theory, and aesthetics, I identify four primary connotations of fidelity that develop into aesthetic demands during the twentieth century. First, fidelity is a rhetorical shorthand for the equivalence between “originals” and “copies,” which also presumes transparent mediation and values authorial intent. Second, fidelity calls for the suppression of noise and privileges efficiency and intelligibility in communication. Third, fidelity corresponds to definition, understood as the amount of detail that a channel can convey. Finally, fidelity connotes verisimilitude, in the sense of a faithful reproduction of an idealized external reality. This dissertation project tracks these four connotations across a variety of cultural domains, including the Spiritualist movement, sound recording and radio, literary translation, and modern art. I begin by examining points of contact among the Spiritualist movement and the emergent technology of radio between 1890 and 1930, which I then map onto the discourse of literary translation throughout the twentieth century. In particular, I track shared concerns about authorship, authenticity, intelligibility, and influence, which speak to a larger tension between fidelity and fraudulence in the cultural imagination at the turn of the century. I then apply Mark Fisher’s aesthetic categories of “the weird” and “the eerie” to analyze a set of experimental translations which consciously disrupt aesthetic demands for smoothness, equivalence, and transparency. Authors considered in this section include Walter Benjamin, Laura Riding, Christian Hawkey, Sawako Nakayasu, Johannes Göransson, and Sara Tuss Efrik. The project concludes with a single-author study of the artist Kurt Schwitters, a figure in the historical avant-garde known for his intermedia collage work, typographic design, and Dada sound poetry. I interpret the tensions that arise in Schwitters’ work as symptomatic of fidelity discourse within modernist aesthetics. Ultimately, I contend that fidelity rhetoric, in its various guises, is a way to manage and restrict aesthetic engagement. Fidelity endures as a technical, aesthetic, and ideological problem because it is animated by the tension between control and surrender at the heart of how we interact with aesthetic objects.