Guidelines for identifying and interpreting visual metaphors in political cartoons

What is it about?

Many political cartoons try to persuade their viewers of their point of view via metaphors. This is unsurprising, as visual metaphors are excellent rhetorical tools to provide, in one glance, an evaluation of a newsworthy person or state of affairs in the world. That said, metaphor experts still disagree about the protocol for analysing metaphors in political cartoons. In this chapter I revisit my own earlier, coauthored work on metaphor in political cartoons (Bounegru & Forceville 2011; Forceville & Van de Laar 2019; Zhang & Forceville 2020), rooted in Black (1962, 1979) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980), to zoom in on criteria for identifying and interpreting visual metaphors. The chapter, which includes a critical discussion of the visual metaphor identification procedure (VISMIP) proposed by Šorm and Steen (2013, 2018), ends by giving some practical advice to aspiring analysts of corpora of discourses featuring visual metaphors. Keywords: Visual metaphor, identifying metaphor, political cartoons, VISMIP, Black’s interaction theory

Featured Image

Photo by TopSphere Media on Unsplash

Photo by TopSphere Media on Unsplash

Why is it important?

To ensure that visual and multimodal metaphor analysis matures into an optimally replicable protocol, its procedure needs to be made as clear and explicit as possible. And inasmuch as political cartoons -- among the strongholds of democratic societies -- usually draw on metaphors, knowing how these latter work is indispensable for the examination of this genre.

Perspectives

“

I consider this chapter one of three studies in which I evaluate competing models for identifying and interpreting visual and multimodal metaphors. The others are: Forceville, Charles (2018). “Multimodality, film, and cinematic metaphor: an evaluation of Müller and Kappelhoff (2018).” Punctum: International Journal of Semiotics (Greece) 4(2): 90-108. (DOI: 10.18680/hss.2018.0021) Forceville, Charles (2024). “Identifying and interpreting visual and multimodal metaphor in commercials and feature films.” Metaphor and Symbol 39(1): 40-54. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2023.2271544

”