OKOPIEŃ-SŁAWIŃSKA Aleksandra

Born on 22 October 1932 in Emilianów, near Warsaw; daughter of the lawyer and civil servant Jan Stawiarski, and the civil servant Kazimiera née Rost. She spent her childhood in Michalin, near Warsaw. She moved permanently to Warsaw in autumn 1939. She attended comprehensive school during the German occupation. Following the war, she was a pupil at the S. Sempołowska Girls' Secondary and Grammar School No. XVI, completing her advanced secondary education in 1950. She then studied Polish philology at the University of Warsaw (UW). In 1953, she married the Polish philology student Jan Okopień. They divorced in 1961. She graduated with a master's degree in 1955 and was subsequently appointed assistant at the new Chair in Literary Theory at UW. In her research, she focused primarily on poetics and textual interpretation, structuralist theoretical poetics, and the communicative theory of literary works. She made her debut in 1957 with a textbook co-written with Michał Głowiński ↑and Janusz Sławiński ↑, Wiadomości z teorii literatury (New perspectives in literary theory). Between 1960 and 1963, she taught poetics and literary theory at the Higher School of Education in Gdansk. She married the literary historian Janusz Sławiński in 1961. She was highly engaged in academic life, with her activities including organizing national conferences on literary theory from 1962. She was awarded a doctorate in 1964 for her dissertation Rodzaje wiersza nieregularnego i wolnego w poezji Mickiewicza, Słowackiego i Norwida (Irregular and free verse in the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki and Cyprian Norwid), which was supervised by Prof. Kazimierz Budzyk and then, following his death, by Prof. Zdzisław Libera. She was appointed to the editorial committee of the multi-volume publication Poetyka. Zarys encyklopedyczny (Poetics: An encyclopaedic outline) in 1969. She resigned from her post at UW in 1971 and took up a position at the Department of Historical Poetics at the Institute of Literary Research (IBL) of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). She continued to combine research and teaching, giving doctoral seminars and developing a programme for teaching literary theory in higher education and middle schools. In 1973, she joined the editorial committee of Rozprawy Literackie (Literary Research), a publication series of the PAN Committee on Polish Literary Studies (KNoLP). Between 1973 and 1983, she served on the Central Committee of the Olympiad in Polish Literature and Language. From 1978 to 1994, alongside her post at IBL she also taught literary theory at the Faculty of Theatre Studies and from 1981 at the Faculty of Directing at the State Theatre School (PWST). She joined the Independent Self-governing Trade Union Solidarity in 1981. From 1981 to 1983 and again from 1987 to 1995, she served on the PAN Committee for Polish Literary Studies (KNoLP), while from 1990 to 2010 she was a member of the Scientific Council of IBL. She was awarded a habilitation degree from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (UAM) in 1985 for her study Semantyka wypowiedzi poetyckiej. Preliminaria (The semantics of poetic expression: Preliminary findings) and was appointed senior lecturer at IBL the following year. She joined the Society for the Support and Propagation of Science in 1989. She received the Prize of the Minister of Culture and Art in 1989 and the Medal of the Commission of National Education in 1991, both in recognition of her achievements in teaching. From 1994 to 1998, she was director of Doctoral Studies at IBL PAN. She was made state-appointed professor in 1998. She retired from IBL PAN in 2003. She lives in Warsaw.