Absorbing Hesitation: Wordsworth and the Theory of the Panorama (Critical Essay‪)‬

I. Sublimity, Virtuality, Materiality THERE HAS BEEN A NOTICEABLE PREOCCUPATION, EVEN FASCINATION, with the panorama in romantic studies. (1) At the heart of this essay is the claim that the reason we continue to be so fascinated by the specter of the romantic-era panorama is that we are still caught in a romantic dilemma. The panorama compels us to confront a fundamental question of avant-garde aesthetics: what distance (or not) should art assume towards casual (mass, commercial, idiotic) enjoyment? Furthermore, the aesthetic debates unleashed by the panorama survive and even thrive in our own new media technology, virtual reality. The outpouring of responses of British romantic-era commentators to the new representation technologies that emerged in the 1790s, responses which oscillate between the poles of exuberance and horror, mirror the contemporary discourse of virtual reality both in terms of the respective new technologies' relationship to established modes, particularly literature, and in terms of the sheer extent of their powers. At both historical moments the question becomes, do new representation technologies transcend the aesthetic and become the real? The ways in which the aggregate of the idea of the panorama (emergent in England in the 1790s) and of virtuality (a late-twentieth century idea with global implications which may be said to be the latest incarnation of panoramic aesthetics) identify and perpetuate romantic positionings vis-a-vis casual enjoyment, particularly as casual enjoyment relates to mimetic representation, are my central concern here.