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How can music history help us understand the establishment of national character? This article discusses a prosaic text by Johann Friedrich Rochlitz as a medium for implementing stereotypical ideas of "the Italian" in German music historiography and, thereby, in public consciousness. It shows how particular musical qualities of the story's fictional protagonists are blurred with ideas of national character. Against this background, the predominant reception of the author Rochlitz in the realm of German music historiography can be reevaluated from a more transnational scholarly perspective. Key to this reassessment is investigation into the categories of fictional and musical characters with regard to notions of both "the German" and "the Italian."
Starting from the definition that stereotypes are based on categorization and attribution, this article first deals with the relationship between categorization and stereotyping as well as images and imagology. The multitude of categories and stereotypes used in the process of perception raises the question of which categories are decisive in which social contexts and how different social categories are intertwined. Following an examination of categories, stereotypes, and images, these questions of interdependence lead to the fourth important topic of this article: intersectionality.
In visual narratives such as comics, national images are actually depicted. While Franco-Belgian comics have been the subject of detailed studies regarding the national stereotypes they convey, Flemish comics have been largely ignored. This article focuses on three albums of the Flemish comic series "Suske en Wiske", in which the heroes travel to a fictitious Eastern Bloc country, Japan, and China. It will examine how both heteroimages and auto-image are presented (visually, textually, and as part of the plot), and how comic characters may combine contradictory ethnotypes. As it will turn out, in the early album (1945) ethnotypes are perpetuated, whereas in later ones (1984, 2008) they are rather undermined.
The natural musicality of Italians : 18th-century medical and literary discourse on melancholy
(2019)
L'attribuzione del carattere malinconico agli italiani rilevata all'interno della letteratura di viaggio del XVIII e XIX secolo sembra contrastare, ad una prima lettura, con una tradizione letteraria che invece lo associava ai popoli dell'Europa del nord. Una lettura più approfondita di queste descrizioni nel contesto della medicina psichiatrica e della trattatista musicale del tempo ne rivela l'utilizzo come rinforzo dello stereotipo molto diffuso riguardante l'innata e naturale musicalità degli italiani. Descriverli malinconici servì a giustificare e la loro passione per la musica. Essi ne avevano bisogno per alleviare la malinconia e per questo motivo divennero più musicali delle altre nazioni.