Veronika Kratz, a PhD candidate in English, has just published an essay in a collection called Silver Linings: Clouds in Art and Science (eds. Dolly Jørgensen and Finn Arne Jørgensen, Museumsforlaget, 2020). Silver Linings is a collection of essays from a wide variety of disciplines looking at how we perceive and understand clouds. The project is the result of a collaboration between the Stavanger Art Museum and the University of Stavanger (Norway), which brought together academics and artists working on clouds for a workshop in January 2019.
Veronika’s contribution is entitled “’Today we are going to look at clouds as perhaps we have never looked at them before’: Understanding Rachel Carson’s View of the Sky”. I examine the only television script Rachel Carson ever wrote, which was an episode of the CBS Omnibusprogram called “Clouds”. She uses the script to characterize a transitional period in Carson’s writing and focus. It was written in 1956, after Carson finished her sea trilogy (Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955)) but before she started work on her most lasting project, Silent Spring (1962).“Clouds” represents a moment of self-reflection for the author at a time when she was considering what kind of writer she wanted to be. The script takes her out of the oceans and tidal pools with which she was familiar and instead shows Carson’s engagement and concern with how humanity perceives and relates to the natural world, a line of thinking that would lead, in the next year, to the start of her politically charged environmentalist text.
Outside the Stavanger Art Museum (Stavanger, Norway)