Performance Research

A Journal of the Performing Arts

ISSN: 1352-8165 (Print) 1469-9990 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprs20

Competing with the Sea

Contemporary cruise ships as omnitopias

Melanie Bennett

To cite this article: Melanie Bennett (2016) Competing with the Sea, Performance Research, 21:2,
50-57, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2016.1162492

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2016.1162492

Published online: 03 May 2016.

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 Competing with the Sea
Contemporary cruise ships as omnitopias
MELANIE BENNETT
With a participant-observation trajectory, this
article will use the premium cruise line
1
Celebrity Cruises is Celebrity Cruises1 as a case study to consider the
a subsidiary of Royal
Caribbean Cruises. Their
temporal nature of contemporary ocean
tenet ‘Modern Luxury’ crossings and examine how the extravagant
attracts a contemporary
interiors, the variety of amenities and the busy
urban mid- to upmarket
demographic that seeks onboard itineraries of cruise ships are
the experience of luxury programmed to distract passengers from the
at approachable prices.
existential experience of being at sea and
prevent the potential for boredom that can
occur from slow travel. This article will also
discuss the tension between the sublime of the
sea with the manufactured beauty of the ship,
which I propose is an omnitopia, a term made
popular by Andrew Wood to describe ‘an
architectural and perceptual enclave whose
apparently distinct locales (and locals) convey
inhabitants to a singular place’ (Wood
2005: 318). Finally, this article will describe the
ways in which the passengers transgress the
events onboard as they begin to settle into the
enclave that the ship’s atmosphere affords.
IMPULSE TO CRUISE
My enchantment with the sea began in abstract
watching Jaws and The Love Boat and reading
Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea
and C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
While most children had posters of pop stars on
their bedroom walls, I had beach scenes, sunsets
and sailboats. The cover of my school notebook
had an ominous setting of a lone fishing boat
caught in a storm at night. I liked the complex
sensation of terror and awe that the image
inspired. For my sixteenth birthday, my brother
gave me a cassette tape of artificial sounds of
the ocean, including squawking seagulls, which
50 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 21·2 : pp.50-57
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PR 21-2 On Sea At Sea.indd 50
he had composed on his electronic keyboard,
and I played it incessantly on my Walkman®
while staring at the 24‑ by 36‑inch horizon on
my wall.
My attraction to the sea was superficial
and not based on a lived reality. My paternal
grandmother was the only relative I knew who
had memories of the sea. Her early childhood
was spent living in the seaside town of
Brighton, England with its pebbly beach that
hurt her feet and salt air that made her skin
feel moist and sticky. In 1912 – the same year
as the ill-fated sinking of RMS Titanic – she
immigrated to Canada via an ocean liner that
journeyed from Southampton in England to
Montreal. Travelling with her mother and
three older brothers, the voyage was spent
squeezed into cold, damp and windowless
sleeping quarters below deck. My grandmother
contracted whooping cough and had to muffle
her symptoms in front of fellow passengers
and crew so that a health inspection wouldn’t
prevent her from being admitted into Canada.
This passage to Canada was her last contact
with the Atlantic Ocean. She had intended
on returning to England to walk along the
pebbled beach again and smell the salt air, but
her circumstances and financial means never
enabled her to do so.
I was 40 years of age the first time I left
North America to travel overseas. Like my
grandmother, I took a ship with a sixteen-
night transatlantic schedule, travelling from
Miami in Florida to Rome in Italy, which I had
booked on impulse after seeing an advert for
Celebrity Cruises. Ocean travel has changed
dramatically since my grandmother’s golden era
of transatlantic crossings. Cruising for pleasure
ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online
© 2016 TAYLOR & FRANCIS
26/04/2016 13:26
 began gaining in popularity in the 1980s,
replacing the functional ocean liners of the past
that were built for the purpose of transporting
individuals. Today, ocean travel is experiencing
another golden age.
In response to the global movement of
neoliberal values, the rise of mega-ships has
produced a shift towards a vacation trend
that is promoted as offering everything you
could need … for any age, style or mood. These
extravagant floating cities package a vacation
where you can be everywhere and nowhere
simultaneously. In addition to a borderless
onboard multisensory display of rooftop grassy
parks, shops, theatres, wine cellars, bars, spas,
pools, fitness centres, symphonies, libraries, art
galleries, eclectic restaurants and crew ‘from
every corner of the world’, passengers also
consume offshore itineraries at multiple ports
of call. This market-driven industry of cultural-
fantasy tourism is an example of what Andrew
Wood calls an ‘omnitopia’. Drawing from the
lineage of utopia (not place) and heterotopia
(other place), omnitopia’s Greek and Latin roots
combine to mean ‘all-place’ (Wood 2009: 10),
whereby environments such as a cruise ship, are
comprised of separate entities (casino, bar, gym,
coffee shop, restaurant, theatre, fashion stores,
etc.) designed to be experienced as a simulated
all-encompassing vast interior. As passengers
move from place to place, engaging with various
sites on the ship, they encounter the spaces
as if cocooned in a bubble that causes the
exterior natural world of the ocean to appear
unthreatening and distant.
The lure to explore far-away shores, enabling
one to live outside their cultural norms and
pressures, alongside the onboard camaraderie
is what entices many people to book a cruise.
As ‘environments of mass consumption’ cruise
ships ‘are places where consumers can indulge
temporarily in the fantasy of wealth’ (Coons
and Varias 2003: 138). Cruises choreograph
opportunities for both constant activity and
large chunks of leisure time, while also offering
the enticing sensation of movement that sea
travel presents. Crossings have been gaining
in popularity due to the emerging desire of
PR 21-2 On Sea At Sea.indd 51
slow forms of travel as an alternative to the
stressful, rapid pace of Western culture and the
era of burdensome security-heavy air travel.
With an appreciation of the journey as much
as the endpoints, ships are perceived more as
destinations in themselves, where the ports of
call have become secondary (Dowling 2006: 8).
The increase in demand for itineraries with
more sea days than ports can be attributed
to the lavish architectural palaces of modern
ships, the amenities such as spa treatments, the
variety of onboard activities and entertainment
and the high-end cuisine.
EMBARKMENT
The moment that a passenger walks up the
gangplank of a Celebrity Cruise ship and is
greeted by personal paparazzi (who continue
to photograph them for the duration of the
trip), they enter into a new field that elevates
them to a higher status, presumably devoid of
the negative aspects of their land environment.
Like the character of Charlotte Vale played by
Bette Davis in the 1942 American drama classic
Now, Voyager, who boards the ship as an ugly
duckling and disembarks as a beautiful, confident
and successful socialite, Celebrity capitalizes
on the mythical allure of the sea to transform
individuals. Celebrity Cruise passengers tend
to be predominantly middle-class to upper-
middle-class consumers who seek the experience
of ‘modern luxury’ and upscale amenities at
accessible prices. In 2008, when the company
unveiled their new Solstice Class fleet, they
launched a marketing campaign that promises
a travel encounter that ‘escape(s) the ordinary’ by
casting passengers as ‘celebrities’ (temporarily).’
The cruise line’s tenets ‘Modern Luxury’ and
‘Starring You’ package onboard experiences
that appear exclusively ‘designed for you’.
Sailing on a Celebrity ship is meant to evoke the
feeling of passengers ‘being relaxed, pampered,
even celebrated’ and in order to facilitate
a star treatment, Celebrity boasts a 2:1 ratio of
passengers to crew, which is the highest ratio of
any cruise line of similar class. The microcosmic
community functions like a small town, where
BENNETT : COMPETING WITH THE SEA 51
26/04/2016 13:26
 it doesn’t take long before friendships are
developed, routines solidified, and onboard
gossip among passengers and crew run rampant.
Over the course of the journey, passengers
acclimatize to their new celebrity status with
behaviour that they may never enact on land.
DESIGN
A Solstice Class ship’s design includes a rooftop
grassy park, designer shops, the largest wine
cellar at sea, a large theatre for main stage
productions, a movie theatre, an arcade, a casino,
a spa, pools, a fitness centre, classrooms,
treehouses, symphonies, a library, an art studio,
an art gallery, five – distinctively different – bars,
an eclectic offering of restaurants with cuisine
choices from various parts of the world and even
an Apple store. The Grand Foyer is particularly
breathtaking and glamorous and functions as
the beating heart of the ship’s sceography. In
addition, Celebrity boasts being the only cruise
line with a commitment to explicitly invest
in museum-quality contemporary art from
internationally established, mid-career and
emerging artists. These onboard collections
■■Figure 1. Grand foyer of
the Celebrity Reflection.
Photo Robert Taylor
52 P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 21·2 : O N S E A /A T S E A
PR 21-2 On Sea At Sea.indd 52
serve as the focal point to the scenography and
provide a rare opportunity to view art outside
of conventional museum and gallery venues.
Each ship on their Solstice Class fleet has
a sea-themed curatorial direction that serves as
a point of departure for commissioned artists
to design from. For example, with the Reflection
ship – the fifth and final ship of the Solstice
Class fleet launched in 2012 – the curatorial
theme is ‘Seductiveness of a Reflection’. The
collection for all five ships represents an
approximate $60‑million investment, including
original paintings, sculptures, photography,
video, drawings, prints and site-specific,
architecturally integrated installations.
THE BEAUTIFUL VERSUS THE SUBLIME
When travelling on a contemporary cruise
vessel, the manufactured environment of the
ship can’t help rivalling the natural setting.
The brilliant and magnificent design of the
ship together with its luxury service, gourmet
cuisine and diverse entertainment is in constant
competition with the outside natural world
of the open seas. I was unprepared for how
dazzling, grand and breathtaking the ship’s
interior is and how easy it became to forget
about the ocean outside. Even on a sixteen-
night transatlantic itinerary, there is little
time to contemplate the splendour of the sea –
a wonder that ironically attracts most consumers
to book a cruise in the first place. The ship’s
onboard stimuli – its opulence, purchasing
venues, gourmet restaurants, entertainment,
star treatment and microcosm community – is
a spectacle so distracting that it’s easy to go
days without ever gazing at the horizon or
experiencing the unparalleled glorious sunsets
out on deck. Even the outdoor pool deck is
designed to encourage the gaze inward towards
the centre of the ship. With the exception of
smokers, my partner and I were often the only
people outside during sunset enjoying once-in-
a-lifetime views. On a ship with at least 2,500
passengers, this seemed peculiar. Omnitopian
places function to create the sense that an
all-encompassing environment removes the
26/04/2016 13:26
 need for exploration beyond the enclave. The
longer one spends cocooned in omnitopia, the
more there becomes a condition of dislocation
where a traveller ceases to notice the outside
surroundings at all. In the case of a cruise ship,
the vast ocean and horizon becomes a backdrop
or rendered invisible and unimaginable. Even
formal photographs are staged indoors in front
of large faux ocean scenes much like the one on
my bedroom wall.
Immanuel Kant’s (2004) work Observations
on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime
is helpful in comprehending the tension
I witnessed between the two competing
environments. For Kant, the beautiful
encapsulates that which is humanmade and
crafted, such as architecture, gardens and
art. An encounter with the beautiful creates
a pleasant sensation. The sublime is manifested
with a confrontation with nature that is
grand, such as the sea, a mountain range and
a thunderstorm. The sublime according to Kant
leaves a viewer speechless, in awe and terrified.
Unable to comprehend its effect, a viewer feels
overwhelmed and is moved with the realization
that they are insignificant. Confrontation with
the sublime is both pleasurable and astonishing
and can cause an existential crisis. If one stares
too long at the vast horizon, one can’t help
but feel a sense of vulnerability, anxiety and
mortality. We are confronted with something
that is so infinite in scale that it overwhelms
the imagination’s capacity to comprehend
it. The sea’s power ignites an awareness of
the inadequacy of our imagination and our
physical powerlessness in the face of nature’s
force. By comparison, the ‘beauty’ of omnitopia
is easier to engage with, because its pleasant
and undemanding sensation is comforting. In
addition to its aesthetic qualities, omnitopias
are ideal spaces for fuelling unreflexive
consuming and behaviours that evoke Mikhail
Bakhtin’s description of the atmosphere of
carnival, especially during ocean crossings (and
repositioning itineraries) that have many sea
days and minimal ports of call, rougher seas
and higher risk of travelling through storms
(Bakhtin 2009).
PR 21-2 On Sea At Sea.indd 53
■■Figure 2. Vacant deck at
WAVES CRASHING AGAINST THE
sunset during a transatlantic
SERENE OMNITOPIA crossing. Photo Robert Taylor
Despite the cruise lines’ attempts to relegate
the natural environment to the background so
that the manufactured environment and its
activities function proficiently, crossings are
rarely smooth sailing. The ship’s impressive
size and remarkable stabilizers engineered to
limit uncomfortable movement during choppy
waters and storms still aren’t flawless enough
to prevent many people from getting seasick,
a physiological reminder of their isolation and
the many days remaining before they are to see
land again. I was one of the fortunate people
who didn’t suffer from severe motion sickness
during a transatlantic crossing where the ship
sailed around a tropical storm, but I witnessed
its effect on the microcosmic community. There
were two days of constant rocking where the
creaking and moaning of the ship reacting to
the water’s force echoed throughout the halls,
reminding us that even the technological
wonder of contemporary engineering was
not immune to the magnitude of the ocean’s
supremacy. Passengers could watch the
storm’s range and the ship’s proximity to
it on the global positioning system (GPS)
channel on their stateroom television, which
displayed a map of the entire globe. The small
blinking triangle indicating the ship in the
middle of the Atlantic Ocean is paradoxically
a disconcerting visual depiction of just how tiny
BENNETT : COMPETING WITH THE SEA 53
26/04/2016 13:26
 ■■Pool deck of the Celebrity
Reflection. Photo Robert Taylor
2
It is interesting to note
that despite cruise ships
being historically safe
spaces to experiment with
sexuality, Celebrity is the
only cruise company to
feature lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgendered
(LGBT) couples in their
advertisements.
54
PR 21-2 On Sea At Sea.indd 54
and insignificant our seemingly massive floating
city is and a comforting signpost demonstrating
that we are not lost.
In the microcosmic community where
passengers and crew are contained for several
days together, acclimatizing to their faux-
celebrity status, ignites outlandish behaviour
that may not necessarily happen on land,
especially after a ship and its passengers
‘survive’ a bout of rough seas. Something
psychological occurs in the inherently
borderless environment of the open waters that
facilitates a climate of play, unpredictability and
excess. Detached from land, travelling in
international waters where laws, jurisdictions
and social customs are vague, cruisers take
advantage of a perceived freedom and potential
for transformation as they adjust to the
constant movement of the sea’s rhythm and its
physical unsteadiness. A sea voyage can be
experienced as a metaphor for liminality –
between worlds – where the ship serves as
a ritualistic space to experiment with hedonism,
identity, social norms and appetites. In their
book, Hello Sailor!: The hidden history of gay life
at sea, Paul Baker and Jo Stanley trace the
P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 21·2 : O N S E A /A T S E A
subculture of gay men who found acceptance
and freedom on cruise vessels during the
mid-twentieth century. According to Baker and
Stanley, being gay at sea was more tolerable
during an era when it wasn’t accepted on land.2
Baker and Stanley state, ‘Un-moored, the
normal order of things may be felt to be
suspended, questionable, irrelevant or even
wrong.… [O]n a ship there would be less
possibility of being exposed by critical gazes
from your land life’ (2003: 53). The sea could be
blamed if someone becomes out of control or is
simply behaving differently from their usual
on-land self. Taboo behaviour can be indulged
without alarm because it’s conducted far away
from ports of call and is safe within the spatial
and social confinement of the ship.
O N B OA R D E N T E RTA I N M E N T
The Solstice Class fleet’s entertainment
repertoire is varied. The most recent addition
are the Celebrity Life activities, which are events
that offer passengers opportunities to enact
the fantasy of luminary status by casting them
in the spotlight. These occasions include red-
26/04/2016 13:26
 carpet events that feature photographs with
the captain; flash mobs where the passengers
rehearse a routine that they perform throughout
the ship; a beauty pageant called Ms. Reflection;
game shows such as Celebrity Family Feud,
Battle of the Sexes and Newlywed/Not-So-
Newlywed; and reality competitions such as
The Passengers Have Talent and Dancing with
the Stripes. The more daring Celebrity Life
activities occur during the last leg of the journey
once passengers have comfortably settled into
the ship culture and developed an inflated
sense of confidence and courage. Hailed into
stardom and intoxicated by the psychological
effect of being at sea in international waters,
many of the passengers transgress these events
by enacting ‘performances of failure’ that
grotesquely rock the perceived stability of the
otherwise meticulously produced cruise stage.
Increasing in popularity, these amateur shows
have gradually been overshadowing the formal
professional onboard theatre productions,
which are perceived as too sombre, tedious and
artificial in contrast to the clumsy, satirical,
comical, unpredictable and, oftentimes, risqué
acts of fellow passengers. Earnest attempts at
performing and competing well are outwardly
ridiculed as the majority of audience members
cheer for the ‘losers’ and freaks.
These performances of failure – clumsy,
irreverent, ironic and blatantly unpolished
– expose the artifice of the manufactured
onboard entertainment and also undermine
the fantasy tourism of Celebrity’s aspiration
towards staged perfection. Failure unravels the
utopian model on Celebrity that reinforces the
prescribed Western fantasy that anyone can be
a celebrity. Their mockery exposes the fictions
of continuity and beauty that bind the floating
fabricated world.
The unbridled and silly behaviour of the
Celebrity Life activities inspire VPs, doctors,
architects, airline captains, psychotherapists
and housewives to shed their land identity
and enact fantasy versions of themselves.
Dressing in drag, enacting same-sex fantasies
through campy performances and performing
parodies of famous real-life celebrities and
PR 21-2 On Sea At Sea.indd 55
fictional characters is a twenty-first century
version of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas on carnival,
a celebration of folk culture, defined by its
humorous mocking, suspending, subverting
and inverting of the socio-political conventions
and hierarchical structures of everyday life. As
Bakhtin noted, it would be a mistake to dismiss
carnival as a form of social expression that
is far too crude and trivial to warrant serious
attention. The inherently artificial environment
of the ship generates a suspension of ‘land
life’ and its work, routine practices and typical
forms of social interaction. Furthermore, in
transatlantic crossings, where most participants
don’t have access to the Internet and phone
service to contact people back home or even
check the news, passengers are further removed
from their land lives for the first nine days until
they reach their first port. This disconnection
that is so rarely experienced in the twenty-first
century, is oftentimes one of the most liberating
and attractive aspects of cruising.
Intrinsic to traditional carnival is the
suspension of socio-hierarchical inequality.
With the exception of the economic disparity
between passengers (for example, Suite versus
Inside Cabin), a different type of hierarchy is
readily established, but not as it would be on
land. The most ‘famous’ celebrity is the one who
risks the most humiliation and participates in
the most events. Those passengers who take
the contests and events seriously and would be
considered ‘winners’ on land are scrutinized and
mocked by those passengers who experience
what Bakhtin calls the ‘laughing aspect’ of
official discourse. The nature of competition is
nakedly – sometimes literally – rejected. The
competitive passengers are a reminder of the
world left behind on land and in carnival; it
is the world turned upside down that thrives.
Passengers who embrace the grotesque,
subversive realm of carnival temporally
perceive their reflection through ‘crooked
mirrors, elongating, diminishing, distorting
in various directions and to various degrees’
(Bakhtin 2009: 127). Its undisciplined nature
produces decentred perspectives. When official
knowledge collides with its laughing aspect,
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26/04/2016 13:26
 ‘there is a weakening of its one-sided rhetorical
seriousness, its rationality, its singular meaning,
its dogmatism’ (107).
THE LIMITS OF ‘MODERN LUXURY’
David Foster Wallace’s humorous essay
recounting his negative experience of taking
a cruise vacation alludes to some of the
downsides to cruise ships when he writes,
There’s something about a mass-market Luxury
Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably
sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and
complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on
board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the
ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety
ceased) I felt despair. (1996: 35)
An existential truth is that one can never be
totally fulfilled and content despite the promise of
it. Somewhere around the midpoint of the journey,
many people begin to tire of the intoxication of
the floating omnitopia with its excess of pleasure,
indulgence and sensory overload. Overindulgence
and carnival is eclipsed by an alienating awareness
that one’s setting is artificial, and the human
interactions between passengers and crew begin
to seem disingenuous and automated. Despite
the initial fantasy that slow travel promises with
its occasion for long periods of leisure time, while
also offering a smorgasbord of entertainment and
other kinds of consumption, the long days at sea
can still induce a sense of cabin fever, restlessness
and irritability. It seems that ‘Modern luxury’ has
its limits as passengers become more entitled.
Returning to Wood’s observations of omnitopias,
he states,
Within the enclave, we find safety but only for
a time. We search for continuity, but we tire of it
soon enough. Eventually, omnitopia confronts
a relentless frontier and a final reminder.
Omnitopia is only a desire; it is not a place.
(2005: 203)
The longer that people are at sea, the more
dysfunctional and transgressive their behaviour
becomes, which can threaten the stability of the
onboard community.
In contrast to Bakhtin’s carnival where
hierarchical structures collapse temporarily, on
56 P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 21·2 : O N S E A /A T S E A
PR 21-2 On Sea At Sea.indd 56
Celebrity and other cruise lines, stringent tiered
arrangements between the passengers and crew
impede the carnivalesque behaviour. Officially,
fraternization is expressly forbidden between
passengers and crew. Crew are prohibited from
venturing out into the public spaces without
their ship ID visible. However, during crossings,
breaches occur with more frequency than they
would during other itineraries. Much like the
earlier era of ocean travel, many husbands who
are straight on land, clandestinely participate
in being ‘gay at sea’ with crew. In most cases,
their wives don’t know and it is whispered about
throughout the small onboard community. In
addition, female dancers express that they are
occasionally subjected to sexual harassment
inflicted by male passengers, which occurs
with more frequency during itineraries with
numerous sea days.
Finally, the sweatshop conditions of the
crew are more visible during a crossing than
they are during a shorter itinerary. Several
crew dread the biannual crossings and
repositioning cruises, not only because the
added sea days mean less opportunities for
a temporary reprieve from ship life, but because
the passengers become more entitled due to
always being around. Crew begin to burn out
from the increased labour demands and the
hours of sleep lost as the ship changes time
zones, moving the clock forward on its voyage
East. The emotional and physical labour of the
crew is even more intense on Celebrity than on
other cruise lines. They are trained to remember
passengers’ names from the first meeting, how
they take their Martini and other small details
of their behaviour that go unnoticed on land.
On average, Celebrity crew are contracted
for six months where many work on average
16‑hour days.
DISEMBARKMENT
The centrepiece artwork on the Celebrity
Reflection is Cuban artist Bert Rodriguez’s site-
specific installation in the Upper Grand Foyer
appropriately named Reflection and consisting
of a suspended tree reflecting upon itself. The
26/04/2016 13:26
 tree above is a living, natural tree and below,
hanging upside down, is its reflection made
of cast aluminium and electrical lighting. The
mirroring of the living tree and the crafted
humanmade tree creates a contemplative
reminder of Celebrity’s ability to manufacture
enclosed fantasies that compete with the
natural milieu that surrounds it. On the day of
disembarkment, I was standing in line waiting
to exit the ship when I noticed two horticultural
experts examining the natural tree of the
installation that seemed to be floundering
from the lack of natural light coming into the
grand foyer. The natural struggling to coexist
harmoniously with the manufactured is an apt
metaphor for the kind of tension that occurs
with cruise ship travel where passengers
end their trip feeling like they hadn’t taken
enough time to experience the wonder of
the sea and the unfathomable mystery of the
physical universe.
PR 21-2 On Sea At Sea.indd 57
REFERENCES
Baker, Paul and Jo Stanley (2003) Hello Sailor!: The
hidden history of gay life at sea, London: Pearson
Education Limited.
Bakhtin, Mikhail (2009) Rabelais and His World. Indiana
University Press.
Coons, Lorraine and Alexander Varias (2003) Tourist Third
Cabin: Steamship travel in the interwar years, New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Dowling, Ross K. (2006) ‘The cruising industry’, in
R. K. Dowling (ed.) Cruise Ship Tourism, Wallingford,
Oxfordshire: CABI, pp. 3–17.
Hemingway, Ernest (1995) The Old Man and the Sea, New
York: Simon & Schuster Inc.
Kant, Immanuel (2004) Observations on the Feeling of the
Beautiful and the Sublime, 2nd edn, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Lewis, C. S. (1975) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
Harmondsworth: Penguin Puffin Book Editions.
Wallace, David Foster (1996) ‘Shipping out: On the (nearly
lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise’, Harper’s Magazine,
pp. 33–56, January.
Wood, Andrew (2005) ‘“What happens [in Vegas]”:
Performing the post-tourist
flâneur in “New York” and “Paris”’, Text and Performance
Quarterly, 25(4) (October): 315–33.
Wood, Andrew (2009) City Ubiquitous: Place,
Communication and the Rise of Omnitopia, New York:
Hampton Press.
■■Stern of the Celebrity
Silhouette during
a transatlantic crossing.
Photo Robert Taylor
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