On Contemporary Culture, Briefly Fredric Jameson is the William A. Lane Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. He is also chair of the Program in Literature and of the Center for Critical Theory. During his recent stay at the Cornell University School of Criticism and Theory, Jameson shared with us some of his thoughts on contemporary culture.
Postmodern culture is saturated with the visual.
I am reluctant to characterize it as predominantly visual in the sense that I think the question of space really takes pri-ority. But people tell us that we are bombarded with thousands and thousands of images a day. This is utterly unlike anything in any previous society, where you had to go find an image and the relationship was totally different. I think that one of the results of this is the supersession of the verbal. Obviously, modern painting is very important, too, but it seems to me that all those things reflected a certain notion of art which is no longer present.