Skip to main content

The Whole Thing (and Other Things): From Panorama to Attraction in Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” Ashcan Painting, and Early Cinema

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Book cover Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity
  • 387 Accesses

Abstract

Devine situates Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” at the end of the panoramic age, when the 360-degree promise of encyclopedic perception gave way to a very different kind of visual turn: what Tom Gunning terms “the cinema of attractions.” Crane’s work is read as an allegory of the machine age, when new audiences were consuming a cinematic culture of incessant motion, which blurred the line between spectator and participant. Drawing on early panoramic films and the work of painter Everett Shinn and his contemporaries in the Ashcan School, Devine shows how the panorama was inflected across the arts as a century turned.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 89.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Works Cited

  • AMB Picture Catalogue. In the Grip of the Blizzard. 1902. http://www.afi.com/members/catalog/DetailView.aspx?s=1&Movie=31999 (accessed July 10, 2014).

  • Anonymous. The Blizzard. American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.: 1899, in “Picturing a Metropolis: New York City Unveiled.” Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 18941941. Anthology Film Archives. 2005. DVD.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bentley, Nancy. Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 18701920. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Biers, Katherine. Virtual Modernism: Writing and Technology in the Progressive Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brooks, Daphne. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 18501910. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economics of Play. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crane, Stephen. The Open Boat and Other Stories. New York: Dover, 1993. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dulac, Nicolas, and Andre Gaudreault. “Circularity and Repetition at the Heart of the Attraction: Optical Toys and the Emergence of a New Cultural Series.” Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Ed. Wanda Strauven. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. 227–244. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Edison Catalogue. “A Street Arab: Contemporary Edison Company Catalogue.” From Library of Congress: American Memory—Early Motion Pictures 1897–1920. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/papr:@field%28NUMBER+@band%28lcmp002+m2a32868%29%29 (accessed July 1, 2014).

  • Fagg, John. On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows, and Modernism. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foutch, Ellery. “Tough Girls.” Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910. Ed. Nancy Mowll Matthews with Charles Musser. Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 2005. 134–138. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gaskill, Nicholas. “Red Cars with Red Lights and Red Drivers: Color, Crane, and Qualia.” American Literature 81.4 (December 2009): 719–745. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gopnik, Adam. From Paris to the Moon. New York: Random House, 2000. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator.” Reprinted in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. Ed. Linda Williams. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995. 114–133. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “The Birth of Film Out of the Spirit of Modernity.” Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. 13–40. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “Chaplin and the Body of Modernity.” Early Popular Visual Culture. 8:3 (August 2010): 237–245. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions.” Velvet Light Trap 32 (Fall 1993): 3–12. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Griffiths, Alison. “‘Journeys for Those Who Cannot Travel’: Promenade Cinema and the Museum Life Group.” Wide Angle 18:3 (July 1996): 53–84. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “The Revered Gaze: The Medieval Imaginary of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.” Cinema Journal 46:2 (Winter 2007): 3–39. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jarenski, Shelly. “‘Delighted and Instructed’: African American Challenges to Panoramic Aesthetics in J.P. Ball, Kara Walker, and Frederick Douglass.” American Quarterly 65:1 (March 2013): 119–155. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mathews, Nancy Mowll. “The City in Motion.” Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 18801910. Ed. Nancy Mowll Matthews with Charles Musser. Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 2005. 117–129. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mazow, Leo G. “Panoramic Sensibilities in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Painting.” An Endless Panorama of Beauty: Selections from the Jean and Alvin Snowiss Collection of American Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. 1–9. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, Angela. “The Panorama, the Cinema, and the Emergence of the Spectacular.” Wide Angle 18:2 (April 1996): 34–69. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • North, Michael. Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Machine-Age Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Posner, Bruce. Note for The Blizzard in “Picturing a Metropolis: New York City Unveiled.” Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 18941941. New York: Anthology Film Archives. 2005. DVD.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rabinovitz, Lauren. Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shinn, Everett. “Everett Shinn on George Luks: An Unpublished Memoir.” Archives of American Art Journal 6:2 (April 1966): 1–12. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Snyder, Robert W. and Rebecca Zurier. “Picturing the City.” Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. 85–190. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Uricchio, William. “A ‘Proper Point of View’: The Panorama and Some of its Early Media Iterations.” Early Popular Visual Culture 9:3 (2011): 225–238. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yount, Sylvia L. “Consuming Drama: Everett Shinn and the Spectacular City.” American Art 6:4 (Autumn 1992): 86–109. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zurier, Rebeca. Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Print.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Copyright information

© 2017 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Devine, M. (2017). The Whole Thing (and Other Things): From Panorama to Attraction in Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” Ashcan Painting, and Early Cinema. In: Gabriele, A. (eds) Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56148-0_10

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics