پژوهشنامه فرهنگستان هنر
پیاپی 8 (بهار 1387)

Heidegger responds to the questions of the nature of art in a different way from the common and conventional methods in the modern time, which are commonly based on aesthetics. The route he takes to get close to the nature of art and the truth of art is a tortuous and hard one. This is so because, in his view, our understanding and appreciation of art, art works, and their relationship to us is veiled by the long historical ontic, Which is by itself a product of the ignorance of being. Heidegger views the history of the late two or three thousand years as the history of the ignorance of being. Ignoring being, man regards himself as the very being, views everything from his own viewpoint, and takes this viewpoint as the very truth. This tendency is quite obvious in our view of art and art works. Heidegger calls into challenge the most obvious and taken for granted concepts such as object and the objectness of an object, tools and their concept, man and his existence, Earth, and the concept of truth. Our perception of art and artworks is based on these named concepts and they have been created on the basis of this ignorance of being. To get into the nature of art, therefore, one should rise above these concepts and the related ignorance. To do so, Heidegger has found some methods in his phenomenological approach. The hermeneutic phenomenological Dasian method can be reduced to: let the objects present themselves, and do not impose anything on them. By putting numerous questions forward, he is to rise above the common concepts in order to allow the objects (whether art works, tools, Earth, truth, human nature or else) present themselves.

After reviewing the strategies for defining art that have been adopted by Anglophone analytic philosophers in the past fifty years, I consider the prospect of defining art conjunctively, that is, by defining the individual arts and joining these definitions in an exhaustive list. I suggest that the individual art forms are no easier to define than is the general category of art. As well, not everything falling within a given art form counts as art, not every instance of art in the given medium falls within the art form, and some artworks do not belong to an art form at all, so conjoining definitions of the individual art forms (supposing they could be defined) would not map the extension of ‘art’. Taken together, these problems indicate that the approach advocated here to art’s definition cannot be successful or convincing.

The magnificent status of Jean Pierre Richard in the intellectual movements and schools of criticism in the present and past century, the importance of his view of thematic criticism, and the unique method of this competent criticism in analyzing and studying artistic works, have all in all made him an influential founder of the kind of criticism which is exceptional in its type. Indeed, the particular feature of his critical method is that- apart from any predicted law or any preset theory- he tries to sympathize with each work in order to find its special and unique personal project. In the present article I will try to first have a glance at the thematic criticism from Gaston Bachelard’s point of view to an examination of Jean Pierre Richard’s method in the territory governed by the imagination of artists. And in order to study Richard‘s critical point of view, it is, in fact, impossible not to consider the movement in which he has elaborated his works. After a quick reference to thematic criticism and his influence of Bachelard, I will introduce the critical method of Jean Pierre Richard on the imaginary world. Finally, I will present some ways of reading that method proposes.

Being influence by Gaston Bachelard’s ideas and theories and the founders of Geneva school, thematic criticism came into being before structuralism in opposition to the academic-traditional criticism. Jeorge Poulet is one of the critics of this approach whose method is based on the wholehearted sympathy of the critic with the author. The critic, therefore, along with an adventure in the inner world of the author, connects his own consciousness with that of the author, so that the text turns to be a mirror to the inner world of the critic. This article, after examining the roots of thematic criticism, points out to the task of criticism from Poulet’s point of view, and then it will discuss that Poulet’s criticism is based on a search for cogito or the prior consciousness of the self in different authors. Finally it will just raise this basic question: is it viable to apply thematic criticism to other areas?

Jean Starobinski is one of the prominent figures of thematic criticism. Like other thematic critics, he views literature as something experimental and emotional, which bears a spiritual essence rather than being a scientific object. Starobinski has established the foundation of his criticism on observation and connection. These two items, which are among the most important and fundamental issues of thematic criticism, have a specific place in Starobinski’s method. The concept of observation in Starobinski’s method has expanded to be a critical observation which involves distance (a view that studies the work objectively) and sympathy (i.e. to get close to the text in order to achieve an insightful knowledge of it).The present article aspires to study the concept of observation from Starobinski’s point of view and the development of his critical views.

Jean Pierre Richard is a remarkable figure among the founders of thematic criticism. On the one hand, he has stabilized Gaston Bachelard’s method, as the founder of thematic criticism, in his various and rich works, and, on the other hand, he has been the cause of the new method called “structure of horizon”, which is a source for new aspects and the current perspective of thematic criticism. This article, after studying and analyzing the characteristics of the critical concepts in Jean Pierre Richard’s works, reviews the connection of Richard’s idea with structure of horizon, which has been founded by one of his pupils, Michel Collot.

Thematic criticism approaches the core meaning of the author’s imaginative world. Thematic critic aspires to connect his second self to the author’s second self or to the creative self of an art work in order to connect the available consciousness together. On the one hand, the thematic critic has to sympathize with the work, and on the other hand, has to have recourse to science and reason in order to read a text. Doing so, s/he can get into the imaginary and dictional network of an object. Theme of a work repeats itself in different forms in the imaginary and dictional network. The purpose of thematic criticism is to bring consciousness to the imaginative, meditative, and emotional world of the author. Gaston Bachelard, Rousset, Gilber Durand are among the critics who have tried to find identification with literature while considering literature as a phenomenological entity. Gilber Duran, like his professor Bachelard and like Rousset, tried to create a connection between thematic studies and structural analysis. I will discuss his method in the following article. The main target of the following article is to introduce the kind of scientific method by which we can reach the main emotional, analytical and perceptive core of the text from the different images and different dictional networks of the text itself. This is done in order to get to the creative self of the writer and to perceive meaning from the available thick layers. One of the aims of this article is to answer the question why a critic should search for the writer’s self and the reader’s self in the original myth and not in the personal myth.