پژوهشنامه فرهنگستان هنر
پیاپی 13 (تابستان 1388)

Depending on a philosophical and aesthetic literature in the realm of media, this article is to analyze a bunch of religious programs on Iran National TV. While carrying a pathological approach to some programs such as worship and prayer, and comparing those programs to the similar ones abroad, the article will try to propose recommendations to produce better programs in this field. The main question that is put forward in this article is whether the TV producers have been able to enjoy and mirror all the aesthetic potentiality of TV in order to place religious concepts such as worships in the frame of TV programs.

I outline an ineffabilist view of music and our experience of it. There is a special problem with describing music and musical experience in literal terms. I compare and contrast the problem of describing music and our experience of it first with the problem of describing sensations and then with the problem of describing God. I make a suggestion concerning the apparent profundity of some music.

This article is devoted to the study of structuralist criticism. In order to achieve the target, the author has divided the article into several parts. Each part begins with a question in order to deal with the idea that what elements are basically supposed to be sought in structuralist criticism or what is a structuralist criticism in its own ideal form. The final part of the article will set forth a proposed model which is, to the author, a new model for literary criticism from the view point of “ structuralist linguistics”.

Structuralism is a name for a trend in human science which is mostly known by its originators- Saussure and French structuralism- rather than the social concept it deals with. Having a view over the last century, we come across this question that since the Russian linguists were pioneers to the Saussurian model, and the immigrant Russian thinkers played a remarkable role in forming the Czech structuralism, how much the ground was prepared for the structuralism to appear in Russia? And after the establishment of the Marxistleninist government how did it manage to survive? When the formalism was prevalent and dominant, structuralism had not been born yet, and when The Soviet Union was in power no trend dared to bear such a name. What makes a research difficult concerning the history of structuralism in Russia is the distance Russian structuralism keeps from the Saussurian synchronic tendency; from regarding the structure as dynamic and emphasizing the personal creativity. This article is trying to first restudy the structuralist elements regarding the post-Saussurian movements. Examining these elements in the atmosphere of Russia, then the article will illustrate the Russian structuralist movement. This research will additionally discuss the movements which do not call themselves structuralist but have been recently called so by the critics

Structural-linguistic analysis is one of the first fruitful approaches to nouvelle critique, which studies the text using linguistic insights, irrespective of external elements. The history of such an approach to the text analysis dates back to Russian Formalists, specially Roman Jakobson; later structuralism and the new study methods enjoyed this approach. The present paper, using structural- linguistic analysis, attempts to confirm the efficiency of the approach and also present a different reading of one of Sohrab Sepehri’s poems through studying text elements.

The purpose of this article is to illustrate Greimas’s method. Greimas is one of the major structuralist of Paris Semiotic-Semantic School who has specifically accentuated the structure of narratives. In this article, I will introduce the narrative structure of narratives in the light of Greimas, and will answer the following questions: what is a narrative? And which is at least a narrative? As a case study, I will analyze the narrative structure and the plot of the book The Sunless Wanderer. Then I will answer these questions: is this book a narrative? Does it follow a coherent narrative logic (internal coherence)? If so why? Is there a fixed pattern (a triple: beginning, middle, and the end) present in this book? Later in the second part, I will try to have a structuralist analysis of a painting based on Greimas’s method.

This article is to study the movie The Cow, a movie by Dariush Mehrjooie, in the light of the semiotic and narratologist A. J. Greimas. This study is based on his theory that all the process of meaning formation is achieved through the relation of binary oppositions. He maintains that the interaction and conflict between the binary oppositions form the meaning which constructs the basis for all the plot formulas in the narratives. Since structuralism illustrates the process of meaning formation, this article proposes two hypotheses to the basic question of why this narrative ends so tragically and why the destiny of the main character is doomed to failure and destruction. To answer the question, the article studies the confrontation of two main discourses in the narrative; nature versus culture. Regarding them as the inner logic of this narrative and the cause to the forwarding of the plot, the article aspires to prove that whether they can build up a dialog or not, and it will prove how the main character is a victim of the attempt to consolidate and unify culture and nature. Secondly it studies the character functions to see how the attitude of the characters and their misplacement in the model of actants may have been a real cause to the destruction of the main character.