Lectures on the Sociology of Art and Literature by Mostafa Mehraeen

The sociology of art and literature is a branch of sociology that examines the social construction and function of art and literature, the relationship between society and art, and the laws governing them. Mostafa Mehraeen addresses this branch of sociology in his lectures on the "Sociology of Art and Literature," which began in the spring of 1402.

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Session 1 | Tuesday, 5 Ordibehesht 1402

In this session, based on Jakobson's view on the functions of language, I have categorized the different dimensions of literary-artistic studies and shown what topics the field of literary-artistic studies encompasses. Further in the discussion, I have demonstrated in another way how topics such as the relationship between literature and power, literature and crisis, literature and ethics, literature and existence... are at the center of the debates of narrative and literary theorists.

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Session 2 | Tuesday, 12 Ordibehesht 1402

One of the most important questions in the theory of culture and art is: what is the most important subject at the heart of culture, art, and literature? Two answers have been proposed to this question: "meaning" is the most important issue of culture and literature; "communication" is the most important issue of culture and literature. In this session, we have explained the first answer from the perspectives of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, and have shown that the path to understanding the literary theory of these thinkers lies in understanding their theories of "religion" and "alienation," and how social forces and the power of image and imagination are linked in their theories. Finally, the method of conducting literary research from the perspective of these thinkers has been explained. It should be noted that these discussions are not necessarily specialized topics in art and literature, and within the framework of these same discussions, fundamental issues of social life, especially the social life of the Iranian person, also become understandable.

Session 3 | Tuesday, 2 Khordad 1402

In this session, alongside clarifying the views of classics such as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, we have elaborated on the thought of neoclassical thinkers such as Berger and Luckmann and other phenomenologists like Heidegger, who consider the most important issue of culture to be the "gap between the part and the whole" and believe that the task of culture, art, and literature is to make meaningful every single part of life and life as a whole. In Wittgenstein's terms, this group believes that the meaning of life lies outside of life, in language, and they try to show how everyday language shapes the greatest truth of our lives.

Session 4 | Tuesday, 9 Khordad 1402

In this session, I have elaborated on the structuralist and post-structuralist view of culture and literature, in which the discussion revolves around society and the human being's entrapment within "linguistic and symbolic boundaries," and how concepts such as reason, the human, the author, the thinker, etc., are constructed within the linguistic boundaries of an era and are merely linguistic constructs that hold no transhistorical value.

Session 5 | Tuesday, 23 Khordad 1402

In this session, continuing the discussion of structuralism and post-structuralism and their consequences for literature and art, I have shown how in the thought of Saussure, Kant, and Foucault we encounter three types of transcendental structures or metaphysics, and how Foucault, by moving beyond fixed intellectual structures and emphasizing "dispersed practices," shows us that concepts such as the author, the text, the writer, etc., are collapsed and decentered concepts, and fundamentally how the history of literature and the history of understanding these concepts consists of discontinuous periods that also enable different shifts in the understanding of power.

Session Six | Tuesday, June 27, 2023

In this session, after explaining the four approaches—mentalist, dramaturgical, institutional, and structuralist—to the study of culture, art, and literature, I began to explicate the thought of Althusser as the most important thinker in the field of textual reading theories, which connects us to the majority of other theories. I also spent some minutes discussing the banality of literary-artistic criticism in Iran and demonstrated how, instead of engaging with art and literature as the birthplace of artistic theories, we have reduced art and literature to handy data for writing vulgar articles.

Session Seven | Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Session Eight | Tuesday, July 18, 2023

In this session, drawing on Althusser, I stated that "the individual only achieves individuality by understanding the laws of their own servitude and bondage," and I demonstrated that we are only capable of understanding this servitude and bondage when we recognize our own subjection by thoughts and ideologies and know how we become possible within ideologies. Literature and art are two systems that, in Althusser's terms, are capable of making subjects of us, and at the same time, they can work to expose the thought that seeks to make a subject of us.

Session Nine | Tuesday, August 29, 2023

In this session, first, by referring to Jacques Rancière's book "Mute Speech: On Literature and Its Contradictions," I showed that literature is the origin and starting point of thought, and I discussed how, contrary to this fundamental idea of Rancière, the outdated methods of literary criticism in Iran (i.e., placing literary texts under various theories of psychoanalysis, sociology, feminism, etc.) have led to the reduction of literature and art to data and the destruction of literature and art. Subsequently, returning to Althusser's theory of ideology and art and Althusser's reading of Freud and Lacan, I once again put forward the idea of art as ideology and the scandal of ideology.

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