Panoramic Travel/Panorama

Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey makes a case for the ways in which the technological advancement of railway travel created a new mode of vision and perception based on mobility, which Schivelbusch terms “panoramic travel.” Schivelbusch uses various accounts of train travel to describe the experience of panoramic travel, and describes the three essential elements of panoramic travel and the panorama from an account by Parisian journalist Jules Clarétie. These elements consist of the evanescent landscape that is experienced in motion and as a result allows one to grasp the entirety of the landscape (Schivelbusch 61). Schivelbusch engages this description by Clarétie with the ideas of Dolf Sternberger, which describes the 19th century panoramic perception as “the tendency to see the discrete indiscriminately” (61). The idea of an indiscriminate discrete vision is linked to the way in which the train blurred objects in the foreground, and according to Schivelbusch, the elimination of the foreground collapses space so that the viewer/traveler perceives him/herself to be part of the landscape. Thus panoramic perception is distinguished by the relationship between viewer-machine-motion.