Co-Writing the Clouds
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13008487 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Barbara Leckie (0000-0002-3598-3495, Carleton University), Charles Warner (0000-0002-8407-1505), Arthur J Schultz (0000-0003-3646-2269), Sam Bean (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 172-185 |
| Publication date | 2025-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Victoriographies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2044-2416 • E-ISSN: 2044-2424 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/vic.2025.0571 |
| OpenAlex | W4413084728 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 18 |
This essay positions John Ruskin’s 1884 lecture ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century’ and its accompanying Annotations in relation to experimental methods in co-writing and an implicit challenge to prevailing understandings of the individual. Ruskin’s essay has been much discussed for anticipating the climate crisis and staging the struggle to find terms for concepts that, as Jesse Oak Taylor argues, have not yet emerged. I turn to another related dimension of Ruskin’s essay: its practice of what I call ‘co-writing’ capaciously understood (Ruskin writing with others, with himself, with the political and social events of the day, and with the clouds). Unlike ‘the future meteorologists’ to whom he refers, Ruskin does not have a community on all points of the globe to synchronise observational results and arrive at conclusions. He instead multiplies his voice and in the process illustrates how no voice is one voice but rather is interwoven with illimitable others and no one, truly, works alone. This essay further argues that reconfigurations of the individual via co-writing and other experimental methods – including, for example, the EVENT conference hubs and platform for online annotation – may offer more robust avenues for climate action
Action (physics · Aesthetics · Art · Globe · Literature · Media studies · Pedagogy · Political science · Politics · Relation (database · Sociology · Visual arts · Writing process · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Computer Science · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Law · Psychology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |