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Poetics Today 23.3 (2002) 563-566



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Book Review

L'Italie en stéréotypes:
Analyse de textes touristiques


Mariagrazia Margarito, ed., L'Italie en stéréotypes: Analyse de textes touristiques. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000. 174 pp.

In this collective work, a group of linguists, sociolinguists, and one historian analyze texts about tourism, mostly Italian but also French tourist guides, as well as magazines, brochures, prospectuses, and art CD-ROM. The abundant stereotypes here—in representations of artworks and art history, of monuments and museums, and even of visitors—raise the question whether their conspicuous presence is the main characteristic of these texts. The essays, drawing on discourse analysis, rhetoric, but also on an exploration of the imaginary, set out to elaborate tools for the description and analysis of tourism stereotypes.

Mariagrazia Margarito studies the image of the other—Italy and the Italian people in French tourist guides—from a linguistic, especially lexical perspective. She adopts the definition of stereotype provided by Ruth Amossy and by Jean-Louis Dufays: "Every verbal structure, thematico-narrative or ideological, which stands out for its frequency, its non-original [End Page 563] character, its fixedness and the problematic character of its value" (23). Margarito thus analyzes the repetitions, descriptions, and generalizations making up stereotypes in three French tourist guides to Italy, each written for a different public. In all, there recur formulas, or "clichés of appellation," such as "in this city [Caserta] we find the Italian Versailles." The massive use of quotations borrowed from a common stock makes the guides look like a dictionary in which definitions come with well-known citations; nor, according to Margarito, is consulting a tourist guide very different from leafing through a dictionary. This allows for different (pleasurable) readings, such as treating a lexicographical repertoire as if it were a novel.

Marie-Silvie Poli deals with the possible impact of new technologies of information and communication (NTIC) on cultural stereotypes in museums and exhibitions of the fine arts. She inquires if and how a virtual visit adapts the stereotypes attached to a consecrated, almost sacred place, such as the famous Museum of the Offices. Basing her research on a CD-ROM virtual visit, she shows that the CD-ROM does essentially differ from the stereotyped discourse characteristic of traditional writing, although one would expect otherwise where the public is able and supposed to respond. In the artists category, "the Offices" offers the stereotype of painters' biography as found since the eighteenth century in, say, encyclopedias. This is a simple plagiarism with a shift to the multimedia form. According to Poli, the person responsible for the CD-ROM entries never considered the competence of the prospective user. She concludes that museum specialists and experts in the new technologies should work together to offer new forms of knowledge and information that would revolutionize the expert-amateur dialogue.

Sergio Bova studies the recent history of Italy as presented in three French tourist guides. In a tourist guide, he claims, a short history of the country enables the reader to plan a visit somewhat more attentive to the nation's complexity. However, the authors of the guides studied dispensed with the history of Italy, except for some brief references. According to the three guides, Napoleon I did not bring to France any work of art after the Italian campaign in 1796–97; of the 650,000 Italians who left Italy in the nineteenth century, not one emigrated to France. Nor is the French reader informed that France admitted Italian political refugees during fascism or that, after the armistice of 1943, the two countries fought against Germany. The defeat of Caporetto in 1917 is mentioned but not the fact that Italy fought on the French side during the First World War. Bova admits that it is difficult to concentrate the whole of Italian history into a small tourist guide and ridiculous to presume that omissions and mistakes are all part of a stereotypical conspiracy. However, the general idea transmitted [End Page 564] in these three French tourist guides is that Italy lacks political...

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