Claire Potter publishes chapter on ruins in Thomas Hardy

AA History and Theory tutor and head of the AA Writing Workshop Claire Potter has had been published in a new book from Palgrave Macmillan, titled Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination. Her chapter, ‘The Indifference of Fragments: Untimely Ruin in Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ tackles the idea of ruins in the writings of Thomas Hardy. Hardy, remembered now for his literary career, actually began life as an architect, training at the AA in the mid-19^th century.

“Fragments usually belong to a chain of a decay that stems from a context of ruin. To tentatively approach a theory of ruins, I follow a thread in Tess of the d’Urbervilles that moves beyond the temporal cycle of birth and decay and illustrates how literature is already an act of giving way to the literary fragment that both negates and sustains it. Focusing on the ending of Tess and the ways in which Hardy linguistically and architecturally constructs this key scene, this essay offers a reading of the literary fragment that in Hardy’s hands is used to draw together, albeit uneasily, tenets of aesthetic representation that work against the stasis of ruin to bring to the fore a more migratory poiesis in the work.”

Read more