Theoretical Poetics
Room 128, tel. (+48 22) 6572-701
The studies conducted by the members of the Department focus on the creation of the methods of analyzing literary works treated as complex symbolic structures, made of language material and subject to various discourse conventions. These studies are a part of the descriptive branch of poetics. They have a distinct linguistic and semiotic profile. They use analytical categories belonging to different areas of linguistics (semantics, pragmatics, stylistics, text theory and discourse criticism). Some of the works could even be situated on the border of poetics and linguistics.
Studies on versology, on text structure, discourse theory, expression semantics (especially the problems of the metaphor) develop particularly fast. Studies from the area of neurosemiotics and those combining literary studies with psychology are equally conducted. The exploration of the role of language mechanisms in communication is accompanied by interest for the language consciousness of writers of different epochs (the so-called formulated consciousness).
The Department - under different names and in organizational forms that have been modified several times - has existed since the establishment of the Institute of Literary Studies. The creator of the Group and its head till 1981 was Professor Maria Renata Mayenowa; after she retired, Professor Lucylla Pszczołowska became its Head, and since 1993 this post has been held by Professor Teresa Dobrzyńska. For many years, Professors Z. Florczak, E. Janus, Z. Kopczyńska and A. Wierzbicka cooperated with the Department. Professor L. Pszczołowska - now retired - still does.
In the 1960s the Department played an important role as the organizer of international meetings dedicated to poetics, whose goal was to initiate dialogue between the scholars from the East and West. The most important achievements of the Group are the publications in the series Poetyka. Zarys Encyklopedyczny [Poetics. Encyclopedic outline], coordinating research on the Slavic comparative metrics (7 volumes of studies), organizing conferences dedicated to text structure and stimulating works in that area (the animator of these works was M. R. Mayenowa). In the last years the output of the group has been enriched by Grzegorz Grochowski's monograph Tekstowe hybrydy. Literackość i jej pogranicza [Textual hybrids. Literariness and its borderlands] (Wrocław 2000), collections of articles: Wiersz - styl - poetyka [Poem - style - poetics] by L. Pszczołowska and Tekst - styl - poetyka [Text - style - poetics] (Kraków 2003) by T. Dobrzyńska. The Department has also participated in the creation of entries for the Słownik pojęć i tekstów kultury [Dictionary of notions and texts of culture] (Warszawa 2002).
In 2003 the Department organized - along with the Literary Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences - the conference "Pamięć w języku, w tekście, w dyskursie" ["Memory in Language, Text, Discourse"] (Sofia, June 17th-18th), as well as a symposium in the series "Wiersz w kulturze: Polimetria w kulturze polskiej i ukraińskiej" ["The Poem in Culture: Polimetrics in Polish and Ukrainian Culture"].