No abstract included. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

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Call number: LD2668 .T4 1948 D7 / Master of Science

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No description available.

This thesis explores institutional features of the Fifth Republic in France that affect women's representation, both in terms of their access to elected office and in terms of their ability to substantively represent women once elected. After identifying factors that were particularly favourable to women in the 1997 Parliament, it assesses the institutional reforms enacted from 1997-2002, which include not only the Constitutional Amendment and the Parity Law, but also limitations on the cumul des mandats, reform of the Senate, the creation of a statut de l'elu (defining elected officials' benefits and rights) and of the new parliamentary Women's Delegations. It attempts a holistic appraisal of the institutional reforms, and their effect on patterns of political recruitment. The second part analyses practices and power within the Palais-Bourbon to assess gender differences in access to parliamentary posts and tasks. It investigates the National Assembly as a 'gendered institution' and asks whether women are in a position to make a difference to the political process and legislative outcomes. It finds perceptible differences in women's and men's access to power, their committee work and use of parliamentary questions. The thesis concludes with a study of the Women's Delegation. After investigating the rationale and circumstances of its creation, the institutional status of the Delegation within the Assembly is analysed. Its contribution to legislation and its modus operandi in the 1997 Parliament, as well as its integration into the National Assembly are examined, in order to ascertain whether it has the potential to enhance women's substantive representation and to provide' safe space' for women Deputies.

My dissertation examines the role played by the surrealist object in the avant-garde strategies of the French surrealist group, in the difficult political circumstances of the 1930s. In my reading, the surrealist object is located in a critical relation to modern art; it depends on the invention of collage for its own realization, but it also attempts to supersede modernism through an act of desublimation, the return of art to its sexual origins. A n understanding of this critical relation is established through Peter Burger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, through the use of psychoanalytic theory, and through an understanding of the difference between Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. The object's invention in 1931 is then related to the cultural debates occurring on the revolutionary left in France and the Soviet Union. The surrealists wish to achieve an alliance with the Parti Communiste Francais, but avoid the politicization of the cultural field undertaken by the Communists in both countries. They answer the demand for the politicization of art with the supersession of art, for which the object provides a model. In the 1930s, the surrealists develop the notion of a revolutionary science that would forge a relation between action and interpretation. They attempt to indicate such a relation in a number of experimental texts, taking unconscious thought as the object of their investigation. As a central category of their reflection in this period, the surrealist objects are often given as extra-aesthetic examples of such thought in physical form. The rise of the Popular Front and the move of the P.C.F. towards a reformist politics presented a crisis for the surrealist movement. A number of surrealists, like Tristan Tzara, Rene Char and Roger Caillois, split with their group in order to work with the Popular Front, while the larger part of the surrealist group broke with the P.C.F. and the Soviet Union. The break with Stalinism led the surrealists to the point of an alliance with the modern art they had once claimed to supersede; from now on, interpretation would be preserved, at the expense of action. The surrealist object, which had exemplified the relation between action and interpretation, begins to recede from view after 1936, as the avant-garde project that had brought it into being became increasingly difficult to sustain.

The aim of the thesis is to offer an explanation for the emergence and success of the French political party the Front national. The project uses theories of political opportunity structures, neo-institutionalist approaches and a theory of ideological morphology to argue that institutions and ideologies have particular links to one another. This, in turn, leads to the argument that the FN's success can be attributed to the relationships between the institutions of the Fifth Republic on the one hand and fascist ideology in France on the other. It is argued that the gradual presidentialisation of French politics from 1958 onward reconciles two contradictory drives in French politics (the party drive and the rally drive), this reconciliation of the two drives and the institutionalisation of the rally drive grants renewed legitimacy to populist ideas in France. It is also argued that, given the component concepts of fascism as an ideology (its ideological morphology) and the links between ideologies and the contexts (institutional, social, political) in which they emerge, institutional pressures such as those generated by the Fifth Republic and its subsequent presidentialisation accounts for a mutation of French proto-fascism into a type of populist ideology. The FN's modification of its fascist ideology and conversion to an overt form of populism is depicted and analysed as a case study of a party's adaptation to, and exploitation of, the new structures of political opportunity created by the Fifth Republic; one in which populist ideas were more likely than fascist ones to lead to a measure of political success given the institutionalisation of a form of hitherto marginalised rally politics.

No description available.

My dissertation examines the role played by the surrealist object in the avant-garde strategies of the French surrealist group, in the difficult political circumstances of the 1930s. In my reading, the surrealist object is located in a critical relation to modern art; it depends on the invention of collage for its own realization, but it also attempts to supersede modernism through an act of desublimation, the return of art to its sexual origins. A n understanding of this critical relation is established through Peter Burger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, through the use of psychoanalytic theory, and through an understanding of the difference between Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. The object's invention in 1931 is then related to the cultural debates occurring on the revolutionary left in France and the Soviet Union. The surrealists wish to achieve an alliance with the Parti Communiste Francais, but avoid the politicization of the cultural field undertaken by the Communists in both countries. They answer the demand for the politicization of art with the supersession of art, for which the object provides a model. In the 1930s, the surrealists develop the notion of a revolutionary science that would forge a relation between action and interpretation. They attempt to indicate such a relation in a number of experimental texts, taking unconscious thought as the object of their investigation. As a central category of their reflection in this period, the surrealist objects are often given as extra-aesthetic examples of such thought in physical form. The rise of the Popular Front and the move of the P.C.F. towards a reformist politics presented a crisis for the surrealist movement. A number of surrealists, like Tristan Tzara, Rene Char and Roger Caillois, split with their group in order to work with the Popular Front, while the larger part of the surrealist group broke with the P.C.F. and the Soviet Union. The break with Stalinism led the surrealists to the point of an alliance with the modern art they had once claimed to supersede; from now on, interpretation would be preserved, at the expense of action. The surrealist object, which had exemplified the relation between action and interpretation, begins to recede from view after 1936, as the avant-garde project that had brought it into being became increasingly difficult to sustain. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate