29 numer czasopisma „Postscriptum Polonistyczne” poświęcony został w głównej mierze obradom VII Światowego Kongresu Polonistów. Pismo, które służy krajowym i zagranicznym polonistom, pragnie odnotować to istotne dla środowiska naukowego wydarzenie i udzielić głosu jego uczestnikom.

Historia Kongresu sięga roku 1998, kiedy doszło do spotkania mającego na celu integrację polonistów krajowych i zagranicznych w ramach Pierwszego Kongresu Polonistyki Zagranicznej w Warszawie. Kolejne zjazdy miały miejsce w Gdańsku (2001), Poznaniu (2006), Krakowie (2008), Opolu (2012) i w roku 2016 w Katowicach, gdzie 22 czerwca zainaugurowano VI Światowy Kongres Polonistów pod hasłem „Polonistyka na początku XXI wieku. Diagnozy. Koncepcje. Perspektywy”. Od Kongresu katowickiego kolejnym spotkaniom nadano nową nazwę.

VII Światowy Kongres Polonistów zatytułowano „Polonistyka światowa – archiwa i współczesność”. Jednym z głównych zagadnień podejmowanych przez prelegentów były archiwalia literackie i językowe, zgromadzone także w postaci cyfrowej, stanowiące swoistą kulturę pamięci, oraz ich ochrona i wykorzystywanie w pracach naukowych. Kolejnym istotną kwestią reprezentowaną w wystąpieniach było usytuowanie polszczyzny wobec jedno- i wielojęzyczności, a także refleksja nad statusem języka odziedziczonego w sytuacji migracji. Nie zabrakło także głosów na temat historii, rozwoju i obecnej sytuacji akademickich ośrodków polonistycznych na świecie. Gros publikowanych w niniejszym numerze artykułów stanowi zatem pokłosie VII Światowego Kongresu Polonistów i porusza wskazane kręgi tematyczne.   

Numer zawiera także część Varia mieszczącą artykuły zróżnicowane tematycznie, 2 przeglądy odnotowujące nowości wydawnicze i filmowe z roku 2021 oraz nekrolog.

Gerd Hentschel’s essay concerns the concept of the linguistic community. Hentschel shows that in both political and scholarly discussions, this concept is used unreflectively and its meaning lacks scientific clarity. When this happens, this concept is treated, subconsciously or consciously, as synonymous with that of the national community. This approach belongs to Leo Weisgerber’s tradition and its concepts – which today seem vague – such as the spirit of language and the worldview of language, which provide an ideological framework for distinguishing one linguistic and national community from another. In the Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these concepts should not be seen in a decidedly negative light. Thus, it is enough to compare the diversity of today’s European geopolitical landscape with the situation after the Congress of Vienna. On the other hand, such concepts can also be seen as an obstacle to the linguistic emancipation of national languages. Dialects are initially only linguistic constructs, which are accorded the dialect status on account of them having certain structural features. Sometimes, however, speakers of different dialects see themselves and their group as something larger, namely, as a linguistic or ethnic community, which is usually based on specific historical, social and cultural events and circumstances. Against this background, Hentschel’s essay is an attempt to construct a non-exclusive concept of linguistic community, i.e., one in which a large linguistic community accepts various smaller ones and in which individuals can belong to more than one without a conflict of loyalty.

Traditional dialectology is developing more and more into historical dialectology, not only in Poland, for the reason that in many parts of the country vernaculars are disappearing more and more. Traditional dialectology describes the situation from several decades ago. Today’s speakers of vernaculars are very frequently “multi-codal”: they are also fluent in the general language. This means that, on the one hand, the usage of vernaculars and general language depends on social criteria, including situational factors, and on the other hand that spoken vernacular, if it persists at all, changes under the influence of the general language: usually, vernacular and general language are mixed, which is also influenced by social conditions. Younger representatives of Polish dialectology today express the view that (contemporary) dialectology functions de facto as a sub-discipline of sociolinguistics.
The study argues that dialectology, which in its earlier phase was concerned with the search for ancient tribes or historical principalities, must partly move away from its old focus on vernaculars in the village, similarly to how the much younger sociolinguistics has moved away from its original focus on the linguistic behaviour of social classes. What unites both disciplines is that they study variations “within a language”, with sociolinguistics foregrounding social conditioning and dialectology territorial conditioning. If the current linguistic situation in modern, dynamic societies is to be captured, then one cannot do without the other. Since the methods and theories in sociolinguistics have developed enormously over recent decades, dialectology can profit more from sociolinguistics than vice versa.
Using the vitality of German loan words in the current regiolect of Silesian as an example, quantitative procedures are used to show how such a dialectology could look, even in a largely urban and therefore dynamic society. The focus is on speakers’ multicodality in different social contexts. If, for example, synonymous lexical pairs exist in typical Silesian speech (here a Silesian Germanism and a general Polish “Polishism”), the isogloss becomes worthless as a central instrument for territorial distinction. The question is no longer where people say “a” or “b”, but with which frequency each element of such pairs is used in various positions in the material collected. Such differences in the frequency of usage can then be mapped for individual phenomena and larger territorial divisions of linguistic structural affinities can be abstracted from the individual maps, taking the place of conventional dialects.

In this article, Anna Wileczek describes a professional subcode of present-day teachers in relation to a specific, unofficial pattern/conversational style, which is known as “teacher talk”. Wileczek has conducted semantic-pragmatic analyses (from a sociolinguistic perspective) of the linguistic database collected from questionnaires, interviews, and teachers’ communicators. She has reconstructed three lexical-semantic profiles related to the teaching profession (professionalisms, neologisms, formulaic microtexts) and she has identified meaningful semantic fields: teaching, its organization and documentation/reporting, place and time of workplace, persons in educational interaction, and formulas of communication games. In the image of the world fixed in the professional jargon of teachers, the dominating position is occupied by the human person as the subject of professional interaction (teaching, organization of work, its documentation, professional development). The teacher is subjected to the requirements and rigors of the institution in which they work, establishing relations with other subjects – the students – willingly cooperating within the framework of standard communication contacts and new media, using communities with a professional bond to self-educate, maintain contact, meet the social needs, etc. Due to the professional-sociolectical leaning of teacher talk it is also possible to indicate structures in which the expressive or ludic parameter dominates, alongside the professional register (consisting of neologisms, acronyms, and neosemantisms). In addition, numerous examples of more or less clichéd signs of the second class (sayings, remarks, verbal shortcuts) allow us to draw conclusions about the participation of teachers in the ongoing social and communicative game.

Collections of manuscripts in Vilnius are stored in three archives: the Lithuanian State Historical Archives, the Central State Archives of Lithuania, and the Lithuanian Literature and Art Archive. They are also stored in the Manuscript Sections of the most important Vilnius libraries: the Library of the Vilnius University, the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, and the Lithuanian National Library of Martynas Mažydas. Among the collections are many documents and written texts (referred to by the Latinate word polonica) from different epochs. Polonica texts by Polish writers and poets of the 19th and 20th centuries have been examined mainly by Polish researchers. Vilnius collections consist of many documents presenting the characters of minorum gentium writers such as Czesław Jankowski, Nikodem Erazm Iwanowski, and Maria Rodziewiczówna. Manuscripts are a valuable source of information about these authors. Irena Fedorowicz’s aim in this article is to show the output of archival studies concerning the life and work of 19th- and 20th-century writers. Some of the results have already been published in Lithuanian scholarly publications in the years 2016–2022.

In this article, Bożena Szałasta-Rogowska focuses on the work and achievements of the Polish Publishing Fund (PFW) in Canada, an institution that has been dynamically active on the cultural forum for over 40 years, publishing books and organizing various types of meetings and events promoting Polish literature abroad. PFW is an association which shapes the cultural and literary life of the Polish emigration community in Canada. Szałasta-Rogowska identifies and presentsthe most important poetic publications among the achievements of PFW. She mainly analyzes books of poetry published by PFW both independently or in cooperation with domestic partners. Among them, two anthologies deserve special attention: Seven Polish Canadian Poets and Antologia poezji polskiej na obczyźnie 1939–1999 [Anthology of Polish Poetry Abroad 1939–1999] and poems by so-called “Canadian Continenters” (Bogdan Czaykowski, Florian Śmieja and Andrzej
Busza) and poets of the post-Solidarity emigration (e.g., Marek Kusiba, Edward Zyman and Grażyna Zambrzycka). This review and description of poetic publications given in this article, combined with a brief historical outline, shows that PFW is not only a publisher, but also a chronicler, an archiver, a patron of the arts and finally a “discoverer” of poetic talents.

Joanna Lustański’s article is concerned with the archives of the Canadian Polish Research Institute in Toronto, one of the few organizations established by the Polish ethnic group in Canada that possesses archives, a publishing house, and library. Her aim is to describe the polonica owned by the institute, and to present the techniques of gathering and sharing the collections. She describes various groups and types of archival records: microfilm collections, scans of Polish diaspora newspapers, pamphlets and leaflets, as well as books on topics related to the Polish ethnic group in Canada, immigrant memoirs, biographies and autobiographies, monographs and registers. Now partially available in a digitized version, the collections have been known and appreciated by a small group of researchers, mainly historians and sociologists. Lustański suggests that the polonica should become a subject of interdisciplinary research exploration to a much greater degree than previously.

The subject matter of Hanna Pułaczewska’s article is the impact of adolescence on the use of the Polish language by young people of Polish origin growing up from early childhood in the German city of Regensburg. She presents the results of a study conducted among 30 respondents aged 12–18, which consisted of interviews, surveys, and a language test. The results show how adolescence leads to a decrease in the Polish language’s participation in the lives of teenagers. Pułaczewska examines the difference between the younger and older age groups in the use of Polish language media and the use of Polish in direct contacts with peers in Germany, the relationship between these two aspects, and the impact of other social and linguistic factors on them. Both age and peer relations in Polish have been shown to influence the use of media in the same language. At the same time, peer interactions in Polish were more frequent if parents used it more often in communication with the child. The qualitative part of the study is devoted to the contexts of the use of Polish in a peer group and the motivation to use it. The results have been interpreted from the perspective of the theory of linguistic socialization, i.e., by taking into account developmental psychology’s findings on the period of adolescence. The relative decline in the role of the Polish language in media use in older adolescents has been interpreted as the result of the decreasing influence of parents and the increasing role of peers as role models in personal development during this period of life.

Patrycja Gardin’s aim in this article is to describe the history of teaching Polish at the University of Lorraine in Nancy, one of the few centers of Polish studies in France and also a place where classes are (still) taught at all levels of instruction, from bachelor’s degree to doctoral studies. The starting point of Gardin’s analysis is the year 1752, when Stanisław Leszczyński, King of Poland and Duke of Lorraine and Bar, established the Collège Royal de Médecine, the first university unit in Nancy. Using French archival sources, Gardin discusses large-scale activities undertaken by Leszczyński in Lorraine for the promotion of Polish culture and science. Gardin’s description of the long-standing tradition of teaching the Polish language in the Stanislavian land has been based on the analysis of annals and emigration chronicles, as well as French magazines from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gardin describes the most important activities and achievements of the Department of the Polish Language: its establishing in 1961, the subsequent structural transformations, its teaching programs, as well as the challenges and threats it faces. This description is complemented by the profiles of the founders and heads of the Department and an outline of their most important research projects. To this end, the author presents the most important scholarly works from two collections found at the University of Lorraine, i.e., the Decaux Collection and the Lajarrige Collection.

The process of closing the Polish specialization at the University of Barcelona began in 2013. As a consequence, the over thirty-year-long history of its existence at this university is coming to its end. The first Polish language courses were part of the elective teaching offer of the Slavic specialization; next they became a compulsory part of Slavic Philology, and in 2009 Polish specialization was created as part of a degree Modern Languages and Literatures. In their article, Agnieszka Mejnartowicz and Pau Freixa Terradas present the outstanding creators of the Barcelona center and the research fields they have developed within the framework of the literature and linguistic specialization. They discuss the current functioning of the center at the “new” philology department of the University of Barcelona, transformed in 2019 into the Faculty of Philology and Communication. In the final part of the article, they share their reflections on the perspectives for the development of Polish language and research programs in the context of the reform of the structure of philological studies in Spain.

The purpose of the article is to discuss the issue of teaching the Polish language and Polish culture in remote conditions on the example of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad. The study presents the educational and cultural events promoting Polish language and culture in the academic year 2020/2021. They included the International Multimodal Dictation and the PaintTalks oratorical competition, which were organized as part of the Days of Polish Language and Culture. The article also presents the methods of implementing two subject courses intended for undergraduate students of foreign philology in the program Polish language and literature, which were entirely conducted in an online form: Introduction to Polish culture and Practical language Polish. Further, the paper shows the results of a quantitative study and of a questionnaire, which express the course participants’ opinions and reflections on the attractiveness and
effectiveness of this form of learning a foreign language. The reason for taking up this topic is the need to respond to the current educational challenges related to online teaching and to present various projects aimed at promoting the Polish language and Polish culture abroad. The text is in line with contemporary research on the promotion of Polish as a foreign language and international glottodidactic studies of Polish.

Inspired by the book Voices from the “Last Ring”: Józef Kret and Zofia Hoszowska-Kretowa’s Correspondence from the Konzentrationslager Auschwitz (Katowice 2020), this article contains a reflection on Nazism, education, science and ideology in the Third Reich. The reason for taking up these issues and the main topic of the article is the rich contextuality in this interpretative approach to Voices from the “Last Ring”. The research methodology indicated in the article is primarily the text-oriented and the contextual analysis and interpretation, which takes into account other perspectives (e.g., editorial, bibliological, genological, historical, and cultural). The value of the source publication analyzed here consists in its rich contextuality, which prompts research in such areas as, for example, science and education in totalitarian systems, epistolography, and censorship.

In this article, Sylwia Kuraś addresses the problem of Otherness in literature and of the stigmatization and exclusion from the public space of what is different, and thus understood as a threat to everything that is familiar and local. Based on two novels by Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Manor and The Estate, Kuraś points to the universal mechanism of building the image of the Other as the enemy. Polish-Jewish relations, Jewish culture, and in it the accentuated role of women, become a starting point for a conversation about contemporary social processes. A priority issue in the context of instilling attitudes of openness, respect and acceptance in contact with the Other is education, which is limited here to lessons of Polish. The school, in its institutional and obligatory dimension, and the teacher who is aware of their role in this respect – these have the power to initiate changes in students’ awareness, habits, and views. During the lesson about Singer’s novels, Kuraś suggests the use of teaching based on “identification”, i.e., looking for a universal dimension in the actions and emotions of people in specific life situations, regardless of their cultural affiliation and gender. The priority in education understood in this way is to go beyond the space of narrative and political discourse of exclusion. The goal is a citizen who is open to difference, critical of their own culture, but also aware of its value.

Judyta Dąbrowska’s aim in this article is to comment on selected problems addressed in Maria Poprzęcka’s latest book Impas. Opór, utrata, niemoc, sztuka [Impasse. Resistance, Loss, Impotence, Art] (Gdańsk 2019). The perspective has been broadened by the inclusion of the latter’s previous interests and scholarly works as well as critical statements. Dąbrowska relates her reflections on the problems of contemporary artistic creation to the concepts named in the subtitle of Poprzęcka's book. Dąbrowska focuses her attention on issues related to, among other things, the contemporary description of art and of the personality of artists, the ontology of works and the historical loss of their ability to evaluate works of art. Dąbrowska highlights the challenges posed to researchers and art critics by the nature of contemporary artistic creation in the perspective of its crisis as it is experienced by society. She recalls Poprzęcka’s inspiring opinions in this area, supported by the latter’s many years of research and reflection. Dąbrowska emphasizes that Poprzęcka does not accept the thesis about the end of art, and points, as a solution to the existing situation, to the need to go beyond the traditionally understood framework of art science in today’s critical-artistic discourse, so as to open reflection on art to anthropological or sociological issues. Dąbrowska’s intention in this article is therefore to bring closer to a wider audience the openness to new methodological perspectives proposed by Poprzęcka, as a condition that makes it possible to fully understand the issues of contemporary art, and thus to overcome the impasse named in the title of the book.

Katarzyna Hanik’s aim in this article is to analyze the tactics used by contemporary authors confronting taboos related to the authority status of the fiction writer. While various critical approaches have already freed writers from numerous expectations, many Polish readers continue to associate the writer with a particular fixed set of attitudes, rooted in the obligation to represent the social and cultural rank of his or her craft. Hanik asks why some authors decide to use one of the most effective and at the same time dangerous marketing tools, which is that of scandal. She describes the two exceptionally controversial figures of the Polish literary market of recent decades: Blanka Lipińska and Michał Witkowski. She focuses on these two authors’ self-referential statements, in which they have commented on their controversial work and the choice of a provocative persona as their image. Knowing how easy it is to be labelled a “scandalmonger” by Polish audiences, the authors try to intercept the language of scandal and use it to emphasize the Promethean or innovative nature of their actions. In this way their conduct and writing practice can be construed as rebelliousness and courage. They also tend to question the validity of the status and the imposed “role” of the writer as a way of shedding this constricting label and manifesting their maturity as authors. Further, Hanik addresses the issue of the inevitability of certain changes in the publishing market. Finally, she raises the question of whether the Polish writer belongs to the alluring “celebrity” culture. Her considerations are located within the areas of literary studies and literary criticism.

This sketch presents the most interesting and critically appreciated Polish fiction and poetry books published in 2021. Agnieszka Nęcka-Czapska’s aim is to give a summary of what happened on the Polish publishing market in the past year. She addresses the question concerning the shaping of bestseller lists and whether the coronavirus pandemic affected fiction writers, poets and publishers by making itself present in literary productions. Her goal has been to examine what type of literature was most often published and which authors attracted the greatest interest among reviewers. A brief analysis and interpretation of ten selected books of prose fiction and poetry shows, moreover, how other commentators on contemporary literary life have written about them. The choice of texts was therefore based not on Nęcka-Czapska’s subjective feelings about them, but rather on their reception. Another goal of this sketch has been to present the diversity of publications and to draw attention to the most popular creative tendencies. Among the fiction writers and poets mentioned here are: Łukasz Barys, Wioletta Grzegorzewska, Jakub Kornhauser, Joanna Mueller, Daniel Odija, Kira Pietrek, Maciej Płaza, Andrzej Stasiuk, Antonina Tosiek, and Bohdan Zadura, i.e., mostly authors well known to the Polish reading audience, among them those who published new books after several years of silence. The list shows that particular recognition among readers (also the “professional” ones) was accorded to works whose authors tried to heal damaged identities, returned to the traumatic past trying to organize the “here and now”, and addressed communication problems. Readers also appreciated stories that can be described as socially engaged. The sketch falls within the areas of literary studies and literary criticism.

Agnieszka Tambor’s article presents a selection of Polish cinema premieres of 2021. She discusses the following films: Bo we mnie jest seks, Dziewczyny z Dubaju, Furioza, Mistrz, Teściowie, Wesele and Wszystkie nasze strachy. Among the films reviewed here is also Wszyscy moi przyjaciele nie żyją, which premiered on the Netflix platform on December 28th 2020 and therefore can be justifiably counted among the premieres of 2021. Agnieszka Tambor discusses these films from a point of view that may be of interest both to Polish viewers and to foreigners learning Polish and studying Polish culture. Her reviews show the cultural background and situate individual film projects in the context of other productions, both Polish and foreign. She discusses the above-listed films in relation to the previous achievements of their creators. Due to the one-year suspension of premieres caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the year 2021 was remarkably rich in interesting new films. At the end of the article, the reader will find appended an additional list of film titles which are Agnieszka Tambor’s recommendations for viewing.

Marek Pytasz był pomysłodawcą „Postscriptum”. Wymyślił pismo jako biuletyn Szkoły Języka i Kultury Polskiej Uniwersytetu Śląskiego. I taki charakter miało pierwotnie, choć szybko, bo już od drugiego numeru, zaczęły się w nim pojawiać rozprawy: Ireneusza Opackiego, Aleksandry Janowskiej, Dariusza Pawelca, Jolanty Tambor, Krzysztofa Uniłowskiego i in. Marek przez pewien czas pełnił funkcję redaktora naczelnego, bardzo się cieszył z rosnącej popularności kwartalnika, potem półrocznika. Podsuwał tematy, zbierał interesujące teksty. Był wyraźnie zainteresowany stworzeniem czegoś, co śląską polonistykę, i rodzącą się w latach dziewięćdziesiątych XX wieku śląską glottodydaktykę, rozsławiłoby w świecie.

This reminiscence is dedicated to Professor Marek Pytasz (1953–2021), a researcher of twentieth-century literature, who made great contributions to the study of Polish emigration literature. At the University of Silesia, he initiated the publication of literary-historical syntheses, dictionaries, and anthologies, which considerably enhanced the involvement of Silesian literary scholars in the process of school and academic education.