پژوهشنامه فرهنگستان هنر
پیاپی 3 (خرداد و تیر 1386)

Since cultural phenomena bear a complex, multi dimensional, multiple, and dynamic essence, they hold specific, and to a great extent, unique characteristics. To do a research on them, therefore, calls for a great skill and precision, honesty as well as adopting various realistic and practical methods. Emphasizing the practicality of qualitative research to achieve communication, analysis and understanding of human-culttural phenomena, this article discusses the guidelines and challenges involving comparative studies.

Some believe that research methodologies in the field of science and art are essentially different. But, the question is whether research itself can be scientific and/or artistic. To get closer to the answer, one must make a precise and explicit analysis of research. The following article attempts to prove that not only arttistic research methodology exists (and is valid), but also this type of method is more precise and specific in comparison to scientific research methodologies. Moreover, artistic research is quite different from ressearch about art - as it is possible to carry out scientific research on art. Nevertheless, this paper stresses that artistic research methodology has an important influence on the understanding of the innovative processes involved in art, whether before or after the creation of the art object. It is hoped that further knowledge about artistic and scientific research provide us with a reliable criteria to evaluate art and artists in the same way, something which has been neglected by the scientific methodologies dominating the modern era since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

This article is an attempt to explain the different dimensions of scientific research emphasizing art subjects. It generally stresses the philosophy of scientific research applied to the art research. Then it studies the place of theory in scientific research and formulation of hypotheses, and it finally points out to the date of processing in art researches.

Gaston Bachelard is a remarkable philosopher with a particular style and is also a critic who has established a new convention in the thoughts and criticism of the time. Most of the books which deal with criticism especially twentieth century’s criticism have devoted parts to this critic and his followers. This article is to study Bachelard’s beliefs and theories from a different view point. Therefore, this article first introduces the method and the types of Bachelardian criticism, and then studies his works and theories from imaginative view and imaginative criticism.

From 1950 onward the way was paved for a new kind of criticism to be born. The roots of this approach should be basically looked for in the works of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. The foundation of this new method of criticism was laid on the new meanings given to the theme of the works. Theme is no longer a subject which is consciously worked on by the author, but it refers to the central core of the absollutely private, imaginary and abstract world of the creator. The theme takes a concrete form while the work is being created, and the language structure and word network come to being. Georges Poulet is one of the critics who have been strongly influenced by Bachelard’s ideas. Poulet’s distinguishes criticism as an activiity in which the critic comes close to the emotional, imaginative and intellectual world of the writer and this happens to the extent that the work acts as a mirror held to the inner world of the critic. Therefore thematic criticism in Poulet’s view is a kind of criticism based on a close companionship between the author and the critic. This article, in addition to a brief introduction to this area of criticism, basically discusses Poulet’s ideas, beliefs and methodology. And finally it views the main tendency in Poulet’s criticism which studies the understanding of time and place in different writers’ works.

Imagination theory (imagination syntax) tries to display a method by which readers can find the structure and the syntax of a work of art; they can as well have a scientific reading of that work. It is, however, possible that these theories and readings, which practically enjoy structuralist methods, to be regarded as paradoxical. But the writer believes that imagination likewise follows the imagination rules and also the rules dominating various imagination creations. Believing in these rules does not lead to the denial of the individual freedom, but it is solely an examination of the circumstances in which imagination is taken into play in order to have a better understanding of its main features and inherent meanings. The numerous studiies in those fields have obviously prevented any claim to a critical consensus. The writer of this article has limited himself to the methodology proposed and practiced by Jean Burgos. This methodology elucidates a constant process which starts from collective imagination and ends up with subjective imagination. In other words, if we draw a line and put Jung’s and Lacan’s theories, which are about subjective imagination, at the two ends, Burgos stands somewhere in the middle. Hence we put our questions forward and search for the answers. Why does this or that image occur to the mind? What does it signify? And what other images does it include as a texture? Which imagination syntax does it display? And how can we learn the grammars underlying the imagination creations?

The author of this article tries to make connections between two kinds of approaches and the study of the works following these approaches .One is the anthropology of imagination from Gilbert Durand’s view and the other is the semiotics of tension from Gilbert’s studies. In fact, there has recently been found close afffinities between the study of imagination and semiotics, which seemed to be impossible before. The author has even taken a further step and studied the possibility of formulating a mixed approach from these two given ones.