David Clark, Goya’s Scarcity (HUMA 117, Thursday November 19, 4pm)
Although often interpreted as a contemporary denunciation of the horrors of the Peninsular War (1807–1814), Francisco de Goya’s series of aquatints, The Disasters of War (1814-1820), was not actually published until almost 50 years later. In fact Goya, who died in 1848, never made his reasons for creating or withholding the series known. In this illustrated talk, David L. Clark considers the non-disclosure of The Disasters of War and suggests that redaction is intrinsic to the series itself, part of an experimental artistic strategy in which the artist takes on troubling enormities without necessarily experiencing them traumatically and without working them through. The acquatints call for a new understanding of the meaning of destitution and loss during wartime. For Goya, learning to work ruinously is the key to living without the consolation of a shared and unified world, a phenomenon that Clark calls “scarcity.”
David L. Clark is a Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies and Associate Member of the Department of Health, Aging and Society at McMaster University. He was George Whalley Visiting Professor in Romanticism at Queen’s University in 2012, and Lansdowne Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria in 2013. He has published on a broad range of subjects, from British Romanticism and German Idealism to contemporary critical theory, and from Immanuel Kant’s late writings to the question of photography, animality and atrocity. His recent interview with Tyler Pollard for the Public Intellectuals Project, “What does it mean to welcome Omar Khadr? University students and the lesson of hospitality,” appeared in Truthout, as did an earlier interview this year, “The Canadian University and the War Against Omar Khadr.”
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