Ricerc@Sapienza

Time for Statements: from “Polish Language and Literature” to “Polish
Studies” and beyond
This article is a general overview of the past, present and future of Polish
studies in Rome, in Italy and in general. The author brings to the fore the
three lines of research pursued by Italian Polonistics from the 1920s up until
today (namely, the triple focus on text, context and contestation). His goal is
to demonstrate and at the same time illustrate the increasingly wider scope of
Polonistics. This discipline, the author argues, began as a strictly linguisticliterary
one and gradually developed into a wider field of study, moving closer
to comparative studies first and then to intercultural studies. Self-evidently,
the vitality and plurality of Polish studies in the field of Slavic studies is part
of a dialogue between disciplines that goes far beyond Slavistics. In fact,
while still preserving their strong ties with general Slavic studies and its
traditional approaches (literary history, linguistics, philology, bibliography,
etc.), contemporary Polish studies (especially in Italy and Rome) are characterized
by an increasingly broader methodological and thematic horizon, ranging
from imagology to gender and postcolonial studies, from visual and performance
studies to Jewish studies and the history of ideas, etc.This issue of
“Europa Orientalis” collects a series of important contributions, including
both historical reviews and proposals for the future development of Polish
studies in Italy and abroad.