Covid-19 Pandemic in Political Cartoons of the American Press: An Experience of Multimodal Analysis

Abstract

An attempt is made to analyze the place of political cartoons in the current socio-political media discourse in the United States. The material was the cartoons published in the spring of 2020 from USA Today and Philadelphia Inquirer, the informational occasion for the creation of which was the Covid-19 pandemic. The definitions of political cartoons as a multimodal text with a complex coding system is considered in the article. It is noted that in this type of text, phenomenological cognitive structures are actualized both through linguistic projection and through visual-spatial images. Attention is paid to intertextuality as the basis of political cartoon: the authors proceed from the position that the decoding of meaning by the recipient depends on whether he and the author have common background knowledge. It is shown that the Covid-19 pandemic is thematically embedded in the broader socio-political agenda, whereby a successful interpretation requires the recipient to have background knowledge of the current socio-political challenges facing the United States, namely the domestic political agenda. It is stated that the studied cartoons are distinguished by their reliance on precedent, and the actualization of background knowledge occurs through a combination of the visual and verbal components of the text. It is concluded that among the linguistic means of creating a satirical effect, a play on words is distinguished based on the literal and figurative meaning of individual lexical units.