CULTURAL STUDIES & COMMUNICATION
Year:2014 | Volume:9 | Issue:33|Papers Count:8

Jean Baudrillard is one of the most prominent theorists of media studies and postmodernism who is perhaps the least known theorist of this field in Iran. His influential theories and harsh criticisms of the cultural structure of post-industrial societies have turned him into one of postmodernity’s most outspoken critics. The keyword in his ideas is “reality”, which is perhaps the oldest concept in Western philosophy. His ingenious exploration of the complexities of reality in our time is both an expansion of Marxism and its integration with a kind of poststructuralist semiotics. The present essay expounds Baudrillard’s thought, placing it within the theoretical framework of structuralism. It then moves on to give an account of the theories that Baudrillard has developed in this framework about the function of the media in contemporary society. The next section of the essay examines Baudrillard’s analysis of the way the news about the war between the USA and Saddam Hossein’s Iraq was reflected in the mass media. The final section of the essay explores the television reports of the Vietnam War.

The present paper is the result of a study focused on the image of stars in the post-revolutionary cinema. In order to explain the phenomenon of stardom, Richard Dyer's approach, which is based on the ideological function of stardom, was employed as the basis. He regards star attraction as the product of certain meanings which exist within the star. In the present study, Hedieh Tehrani, who was a star during 1990s, was selected. Her first 13 movies were analyzed semiotically through qualitative content analysis in which the unit of analysis was scene analysis. Findings of this study indicated that five components including well-known directors, the star's character, the opposite role, the difference between the star and other female characters of the movie, and the type of her movies contributed in turning her into a star. In addition, Hedieh Tehrani's image contains meanings and values that were then attractive to the society. Hedieh Tehrani plays the leading role in her movies; she is active, employed, socially skilled, materialistic, born in an affluent family, superior to the leading actor, comfortable in her relationship with men, not committed to family traditions, single, self-assured, bold and dressing differently. Therefore, she is deemed a modernist. Her being modernist is a result and a reflection of social transformation in Iran during 1990s. In fact, the time element also plays a significant role in creating the star image.

This paper studies the reflection of war in the Iranian cinema and its changes over time. According to Nicholas Pronay, it has been assumed that few years after war and due to changes in social conditions, society’s viewpoint towards war changes and therefore different viewpoints about war will get a chance to appear. According to this theory, the perspective of War Cinema in the 2000s should be different from the war films before that decade. So, in this thesis the war cinema in three periods of 1981 to 1988; 1988 to 1999 and in 2000s is studied. The first two periods are explored by using literature review and results of previous studies; however, the third period is studied by analyzing selected war films using Structural Semiology.The results show that, those films produced in the first period, create heroes and epic sensations, as wartime and the conditions of a war-stricken society dictates, while the films produced in second period show mostly social impacts of war including the situation of war refugees, the veterans that returned from war, and society’s encounter with them. Comparing the results of two periods with the third one showed that a different approach has been taken in war movies produced in 2000s, when the Bae’th regime in Iraq is overthrown and the relationship between two countries is improved. Movies with peace-finding and anti-war contents with different personating of Iranian and Iraqi soldiers have been produced in this period and this is unprecedented phenomena in the Iranian war cinema.

This article studies representation of religion in Mostafa Mastoor’s novels. For this purpose, Mastoor’s three main novels, “Rooye Mahe Khoda Ra Beboos,” “Ostekhane Khook Va Dasthaye Jozami”, and “Man Gonjeshk Nistam” has been analayzed using grounded theory method. Based on the results, experience of crisis is the main focus and experience of death, pain, evil and existential crisis are the causal conditions of experience of crisis. Disability in interpretation is emphasized as the outcome of the experienced crisis.The results show that religion in Mastoor’s novelsis mostly represented in the form of faith, spirituality, and ethics, and the role of Sharia is weak.

The goal of this article is to study the relationship between academic capital and aesthetics taste. The main assumption of this article which is induced from Pierre Bourdieu’s theories is based on this believe that formation of legitimate taste in individuals is initially has a close relationship with their level of education and then their social origin. Despite of importance of social origin, the main focus of this article is on the effective role of education in formation of legitimate taste. To evaluate this theory, a range of individuals with high academic capital has been studied quantitatively. This study shows that aesthetics taste in individuals with high academic capital is far from legitimate taste, since it seems that in Iran, art cannot be considered as the main component and hard core of culture. Moreover, the results of this research indicate that the legitimate taste is formed from one hand under influence of inherited cultural capital and from other hand friend networks and social capitals.

This paper is an effort to understand the Iranian everyday life through the so-called family magazines' omen pages. Reaching the structure of these contents and understanding the social and cultural context of this phenomenon, we analyzed the omen page of the "Khanevanede Sabz" magazine, titled "month to month with happiness secrets". We applied the "global-local" approach and discourse analysis insights of Teun A. Van Dijk to interpret the contents. The findings illustrate that at first, the omen sentences include generalizations, tautologies, positive thinking, restating trivial axioms and fatalism. At the second step, omen contents depict readers' everyday lives through matters such as providence, describing problems, qualifying characteristics, communications, and love relations according to the basic knowledge of their social and cultural contexts.

Computer games semiotically convey symbols which show the discourse and ideological relations of their producers and the others. The game named CALL of DUTY is one of those computer games which convey such ideological signs that can be narrated from postcolonial prospect, the Symbols of the despotism of western imperialism and America toward third world and especially Middle East. this article within the traditional of cultural studies and with emphasize on postcolonial thinkers like, Edward Saeed and other semiotic theories with emphasize on John Fisks has been written. These two critical traditions will guide us to understand the ideological and historical symbols of the game as postcolonial production.The analysis of the texts in this article has been done by applying the semiotic techniques. By using the Fisk’s approach and demystification of the existing codes and with referring to the relationship between social, ideological and technical codes in representation of Middle East and formation of terrorism, this game seems to be more than a mere game and can be studied as a social phenomenon with discursive and ideological aspects.The results shows that the existence of different steps, scenes, texts, using of vocal effects, transfigures, lighting, and etc, in narration of strategic and interactive of East/Middle East has been able to step up from a play to a text with postcolonial characters.