THE RETURN OF LÉON BAKST: SLAV MAGIC OR ORIENTAL OTHER?

Seeing “The Return of Léon Bakst” in the Berlin-based Russian illustrated review Zhar ptitsa (Firebird) in 1922, what “return” might its readers have assumed to be intended? Was it about a return to Judaism that Bakst had abandoned 20 years earlier? Or perhaps a return to Russia, a dream of so many Russian Berliners in that year? Or knowing that the article's author, André Levinson, was a dance critic, could it be about the artist's return as a stage designer to Diaghilev's famous Ballets Russes? In a figurative sense, all three assumptions were true. However, there lies a good deal more behind the depicted return of Léon Bakst. This article explores those three possibilities within the context of the ambivalence created around the figure of Léon Bakst that swayed between the magic of Slav folklore and Western perceptions of the Oriental Other.     

L’âge subjectif en contexte de formation. Étude auprès d’une population estudiantine roumaine

Subjective age is a little-used variable in psychological research, in spite of being considered by numerous authors a more accurate indicator as compared to the chronological age. The current research aims to concentrate on the subjective age of the students while in their formation years and to identify the connections that it establishes with their chronological age and their subjective age in general. Two hundred and twenty-eight students from the university of Brasov, aged between 18 and 56 answered two questionnaires (the Romanian adaptation of the Staitz and McClay (1998) questionnaire and the adaptation of the same questionnaire to the context of academic formation). The questionnaires were separated by another one, administered for relaxation purposes. The results show that there exists a subjective age during the formation years, which is different from, but nonetheless correlated to the chronological age and to the subjective age in general. The results bring forward the impact of the context, in the given situation an academic one, on the age that one gives himself.     

Camus’s Algerian in Paris: A Prose Poetic Reading of <Emphasis Type="Italic">L’Étranger</Emphasis>

This paper demonstrates that L'étranger, Camus's famous novel about an outsider, had by as early as 1946 become just as much of an 'insider' in terms of its affiliation to the Parisian literary tradition. More than an insider simply by virtue of its contemporary place in the French canon, then, the novel is also intertextually bound to a tradition of oxymoronic poetics dating back to Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen (Les Petits poèmes en prose). I shall examine the way in which L'étranger performs its prose poetics, thereby establishing it as exemplary of a Parisian model of modernity. Additionally, the famous scene on the beach will be considered as a liminal space and as a literary translation of Paris into the desert, which, once a joke for Paris's relationship to provincial France, became after the Second World War a new allegory for the capital's self-alterity.     

“SPANISH ISRAELITE(S), SON(S) OF COLOMBIA”: ERNESTO CORTISSOZ AND ABRAHAM Z. LÓPEZ PENHA IN BARRANQUILLA, 1850–1950

Barranquilla, a city on the Colombian Caribbean, blossomed from a tiny village at the beginning of the nineteenth century into a booming, forward-looking port city by 1900. Unlike the rest of Colombia, Barranquilla became a magnet for multiethnic overseas immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Caribbean Sephardim, mostly from Curaçao, made vital contributions to the development of Barranquilla and, in fact, their trajectory seemed to echo the historical arc of the city itself. Among these individuals were Ernesto Cortissoz, businessman and commercial aviation pioneer, and Abraham López Penha, author and literary promoter. Cortissoz was a freethinker who expressed a strong reservation toward religion and, while he married a non-Jewish woman and his descendants assimilated into Catholic society, he did not convert to Catholicism. By contrast, López Penha had an affirmative, creative and public engagement with Sephardic and Hispanic American identities. He corresponded with figures such as Ángel Pulido and Miguel de Unamuno—the famous Spanish advocates of Sephardism—and had a consummate devotion to Spanish language and letters. The trajectories of these individuals reveal that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean Sephardim were not vestiges of the early modern period but rather engaged participants with distinct Jewish responses, and contributions, to modern Hispanic American contexts.     

Étude de l’avis du défenseur des Droits sur l’interprétation de l’article L.2141-11 du Code de la santé publique

To acknowledge the article L2141-11 CSP to be interpreted as allowing transsexual persons, who engaged themselves in a male-to-female transition path, to benefit from gametes’ self-conservation, the French Ombudsman requests that any future usages should not be taken into account in any submission analysis. This theoretical position implies two main criticisms. On one hand, it does not comply with the literal meaning and the intended objective of article L2141-11 CSP which, at contrary, imposes to check both of the origin of predictable infertility and the aim of gametes’ self-conservation. On the other hand, it refrains from considering what lies under the request by minimizing its societal background meaning the gender recognition instead of sexed reality.