In recent years, visual culture has emerged as a growing and important interdisciplinary field of study. Visual culture regards images as central to the representation of meaning in the world. It encompasses "high" art without an assumption of its higher status. But despite the current proliferation of studies and programs in visual culture, there seems to be no consensus within the field itself as to its scope and objectives, definitions, and methods. In Visual Culture, Margaret Dikovitskaya offers an overview of this new area of study in order to reconcile its diverse theoretical positions and understand its potential for further research. Her aim is to show how visual culture can avoid what she defines as the Scylla and Charybdis that threaten it: the lack of a specific object of study (given its departure from the traditional hierarchies of art history) and the expansion of the field to the point of incoherence as it seems to subsume everything related to the cultural and the visual.<br /> <br /> Dikovitskaya gives us an archaeology of visual culture, examining the "cultural turn" away from art history and the emergence of visual studies. Drawing on responses to questionnaires, oral histories, and interviews with the field's leading scholars, she discusses first the field's history, theoretical frameworks, and methods, and then examines four programs and courses in visual culture -- those at the University of Rochester, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Irvine, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Bringing together considerations of theory and practice, Dikovitskaya charts the future of visual culture programs in the twenty-first century.

-作者簡介-

瑪格麗特•迪科維茨卡婭（Margaret Dikovitskaya），加拿大維多利亞大學藝術史係教授。

-譯者簡介-

李芳，西南大學外國語學院副教授，文學博士，碩士生導師，主要從事美國文學與文化研究。

肖偉勝，男，1970年生，西南大學文學院教授、文學博士、博士生導師、副院長，主要從事西方美學與視覺文化研究。主持“‘文化轉嚮’與視覺文化研究”、“‘語言學轉嚮’與視覺方法論研究”、“視覺文化與圖像意識研究”等多項國傢社科基金重點項目、教育部人文社科項目等課題。撰有《視覺文化與圖像意識》、《視覺文化與當代文化批評》、《現代性睏境中的極端體驗》等學術專著。曾在《文藝研究》、《文學評論》、《二十一世紀》（香港）等核心刊物發錶論文60餘篇，其中多篇被全文復印或轉載。