Komparatyzm – italianizm – orientalizm. Badania porównawcze jako Dziedzina

The article presents the book by Olga Płaszczewska Przestrzenie komparatystyki – italianizm (Th e Fields of Comparative Studies: Italianism) as a manifesto of the discursive force of Italian studies – or as I call them in reference to Edward Said’s work: “Italianism” – understood as a discipline. Such a perspective stands in opposition to perceiving “Italianism” merely as a method of study. In my attempts to interpret Płaszczewska’s monumental comparative study of Italian and Polish literature (on the examples of Ignacy Kraszewski, Ignazio Silone and many others), in addition backed up by a competent and thorough presentation of the main issues of comparative studies, I indicate the author’s arguments aiming at separation of the “complit” from the literary studies in order to justify the discipline’s autonomy. Płaszczewska’s way of achieving that goal – which by any means does not have to be perceived as a hostile gesture towards any other discipline, but simply as a self-referential discursive refl ex – is very convincing, at least from the rhetorical point of view. By including some of Polish (e.g. Henryk Markiewicz) and foreign (e.g. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) researchers in the comparative studies’ field (and therefore excluding them from the literary theory fi eld of study) or by stressing the importance and the infl uence of Italian studies on the status of literary studies as a whole, the author creates a vision of a fully self-referential, autonomous fi eld of literary studies – i.e. comparative studies. In effect I describe the book as a signal of a more complex phenomenon of what I would like to call “comparatism”, another term – after “Italianism” – suggesting a fundamental connection to orientalism as described by Edward Said.