In an 1899 debate on the future of Irish literature, John Eglinton drew attention to the possibility of a national epic reviving the ancient legacy of Homer through the ‘concrete … poetry’ of technology, including the most modern media – the cinematograph and phonograph. Eglinton's vision is so prophetic of Ulysses as cinematised, modern epic that it is tempting to think that Joyce read it. Be that as it may, Ulysses is just as influenced by the techniques of another pre-filmic visual entertainment – the panorama, which subsumed the modern city and its activities in its epic, ‘all-seeing’ scope – especially through the moving forms into which it evolved.

Dolf Sternberger, in his classic 1938 study (which Benjamin reviewed and was influenced by in developing his own critique of modernity's mediacultural imaginary), considered the panorama crucial for understanding ‘how the 19th century man saw himself & his world & how he experienced history’. Sternberger detected the influence of ‘panoramisation’ everywhere – in media, technology, travel and narratives of colonialism, evolution and progress – enabling the contemporary Western subject to visualise their dominant place in the world and the whole ‘moving spectacle’ of civilisation. Alongside actual panorama shows, Huhtamo has historicised the emergence of a ‘discursive panorama’ as ‘figure of speech, writing, or visual representation’. Hence ‘Panoramas of the imagination are no less interesting, or real, than the concrete ones’ (IiM, p. 15). According to the OED, the term quickly accumulated richer meanings, such as a ‘complete or comprehensive survey or presentation of a subject’, evident in titles such as The Political Panorama (1801), The Panorama of Youth (1806) and Literary Panorama (1806). From around 1802 (after Robert Barker's patent expired), it was used for ‘an unbroken view of a whole region surrounding an observer’. By 1813 it had acquired a subjective meaning, anticipating its association with the psychological ‘stream of consciousness’: as a ‘continually moving scene or mental vision in which life passes before ones eyes’. As William Uricchio points out, both panoramic practice and its linguistic invocations gradually slipped their moorings from Barker's definition, ‘eliding the elaborate framing of an image so as to make one feel on the spot’, for the effect of visual teleportation and immersion in general.