Thesis title: Con gli occhi del vicino: Deutschland- e Italienbilder nella stampa italiana e tedesca dal 1945 al 1963
Newspapers are a fundamental form of cultural production, capable of shaping public discourse and profoundly influencing the perception of other cultures, thus also contributing to the definition of relations between them. This research project aims to investigate, from a contrastive perspective, the development of mutual representations of Italians and Germans conveyed by the daily and periodical press between 1945 and 1963, a crucial period for the redefinition of relations between the two countries in the post-World War II period. Although at the institutional level there is often talk of a close and positive Italian-German relationship, this official image is not always reflected in public opinion and in the representations conveyed by the media, primarily the press. The research involves the construction of two specialized and diachronic corpora, composed of selected newspaper articles, and is based on the methodological approach of Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), which integrates tools of discourse analysis and computational linguistics. Through methods such as keyword analysis, collocation and co-occurrence analysis, and the use of corpus query tools (in our case, Sketch Engine), recurring patterns of linguistic usage will be identified and illustrated, to be understood as expressions of repeated discursive practices by authors, institutions, and social groups. The ultimate goal is to reconstruct the evolution of discourse on the mutual national images of Italians and Germans.