A Critical Multimodal Metaphor Analysis Of American Political Cartoons

Political cartoons have the communicative purposes of commenting on society,criticizing and revealing political realities and phenomena,and metaphor is a common tool used by cartoonists.As a kind of multimodal discourse combining images and words,political cartoons contain a large number of multimodal metaphors.Critical linguists have purposed that metaphors are not completely neutral,but carry the ideology of the users.By critically analyzing the metaphorical phenomena,the stance,ideologies and values behind the users of metaphors and their discourse communities can be revealed.However,present critical metaphor research mostly focuses on verbal texts,but lacks in-depth analysis of multimodal discourse.The outbreak of the RussiaUkraine conflict has received widespread attention from media all over the world,so a large number of multimodal discourses on this topic have been produced by various discourse communities,providing a fertile ground for multimodal metaphor analysis.Therefore,this paper attempts to analyze multimodal metaphors in American political cartoons on Russia-Ukraine conflict under the framework of critical metaphor analysis,which includes following steps: metaphor identification,metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation.Taking 124 cartoons collected at the American news cartoons website(https://caglecartoons.com)from February 2022 to November 2022 on the theme of the Russia-Ukraine conflict,this paper uses artificial metaphor identification procedure Vis MIP to identify the multimodal metaphors in selected cartoons,and the results are analyzed by combining critical metaphor analysis and multimodal metaphor theory to explore the following three questions:(1)What metaphors are used in the representation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in American political cartoons?(2)How do multimodal metaphors in American political cartoons on Russia-Ukraine conflict construct meanings?(3)What ideology and values of American society are conveyed by multimodal metaphors in American political cartoons on Russia-Ukraine conflict?The major findings of the study are as follows:(1)There are abundant metaphors used in American political cartoons on Russia-Ukraine conflict,which can be classified into seven types according to the categories of source domains,including object metaphor,animal metaphor,human being metaphor,food metaphor,journey metaphor,game metaphor,and disaster metaphor.Among them,object metaphor accounts for the largest proportion of 36.2%;animal metaphor accounts for 29.1%;human being metaphor and food metaphor share the same percent of 8.7%;and they are followed by journey(7.9%),game(6.3%)and disaster metaphor(3.1%).(2)The construction of multimodal metaphorical meanings in American political cartoons on Russia-Ukraine conflict is based on the mapping process from source domain to target domain,in which ideological and historical-cultural factors play important roles.(3)The use of multimodal metaphors in political cartoons about Russia-Ukraine conflict reflects its ideology.For example,multimodal metaphors,especially animal metaphors and entity metaphors successfully realize the objectification and animalization of Russia,highlighting its inhuman cruelty and ruthlessness,reflecting American condemnation and opposition to the Russian military operations,and arousing the readers’ antipathy against Russia and sympathy for Ukraine.The significance of this thesis lies in that by extending the research object of critical metaphor analysis to multimodal discourse,it promotes the effective integration of multimodal metaphor and critical metaphor analysis,enriches the study of multimodal metaphor from social dimension.Moreover,this study has certain insights for cultivating readers’ critical thinking about messages on media and improving multimodal discourse literacy.