Play Among the Ruins: David Jones, Meaning, and Play
type: CreativeWork
description: In “Art in Relation to War,” David Jones makes a terse, but stimulating comment on art and the creative process: “An act of art is essentially a gratuitous act. [...] It is essentially ‘play.’” The aim of this dissertation is to examine Jones’s work in relation to the concept of playfulness. Although it makes the most of play’s various associations (pleasure, joyousness, games, children’s play), this dissertation uses the word to describe an activity that is gratuitous (that serves no end other than itself) and, moreover, that is paradoxically material and immaterial, rule-bound (containing aesthetic, intellectual, and theoretical constraints) and free, at once. By approaching Jones’s poetic and visual work by way of the word play, this dissertation provides a model of interpretation that is new to Jones studies and puts pressure on the serious and statement-driven modes of interpretation often used by his readers. “Play Among the Ruins: David Jones, Meaning, and Play” begins with an Introduction that examines the working sense of play that emerges in Jones’s essays and letters. After defining play as a gratuitous act, this introductory chapter positions Jones’s sense of the word in relation to his Catholic beliefs and, later, to the playful aspects of his subjective life, particularly his child-like behaviour and what Donald Winnicott would describe as his issues around personal attachment and development. Additionally, this chapter provides the reader with a definition and history of play, touching upon various theoretical uses of the word by thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Schiller. Chapter 1 then considers play in the context of aesthetic interpretation. The chapter examines the ways that Jones’s reviewers have applied constricting models of interpretation to his poetic and visual work and culminates in analyses of Paul Fussell and Elizabeth Ward’s unsympathetic studies of Jones. The chapter then ends by defining a mode of interpretation that is essent…
abstract: In “Art in Relation to War,” David Jones makes a terse, but stimulating comment on art and the creative process: “An act of art is essentially a gratuitous act. [...] It is essentially ‘play.’” The aim of this dissertation is to examine Jones’s work in relation to the concept of playfulness. Although it makes the most of play’s various associations (pleasure, joyousness, games, children’s play), this dissertation uses the word to describe an activity that is gratuitous (that serves no end other than itself) and, moreover, that is paradoxically material and immaterial, rule-bound (containing aesthetic, intellectual, and theoretical constraints) and free, at once. By approaching Jones’s poetic and visual work by way of the word play, this dissertation provides a model of interpretation that is new to Jones studies and puts pressure on the serious and statement-driven modes of interpretation often used by his readers. “Play Among the Ruins: David Jones, Meaning, and Play” begins with an Introduction that examines the working sense of play that emerges in Jones’s essays and letters. After defining play as a gratuitous act, this introductory chapter positions Jones’s sense of the word in relation to his Catholic beliefs and, later, to the playful aspects of his subjective life, particularly his child-like behaviour and what Donald Winnicott would describe as his issues around personal attachment and development. Additionally, this chapter provides the reader with a definition and history of play, touching upon various theoretical uses of the word by thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Schiller. Chapter 1 then considers play in the context of aesthetic interpretation. The chapter examines the ways that Jones’s reviewers have applied constricting models of interpretation to his poetic and visual work and culminates in analyses of Paul Fussell and Elizabeth Ward’s unsympathetic studies of Jones. The chapter then ends by defining a mode of interpretation that is essent…
author: Assaly, Alex Michael
language: en
keywords: David Jones, Play, Playfulness, Caritas, Meaning, In Parenthesis, The Anathemata, Dying Gaul, Children's Art, Kettle's Yard
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/c7f4e849-2f21-4db9-a575-48b9f902d0cc/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2019-10-26
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:23:59Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.43235