Pictorial Metaphors and Narrativity in Coronavirus Discourse

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Department of English, Faculty of AlAlsun, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

Abstract

In modern digital world, the internet has become a platform for expressing public opinion, that allows for different forms of expression. One form that has become widely spread in the cyber world is internet memes. This study explores the use of internet memes during the coronavirus pandemic outbreak to spread awareness about the coronavirus and criticise people’s behaviour as well as governments’ measures to combat the pandemic. It hypothesizes that these memes present a complicated form of narrativity, as they rely on pictorial metaphors, employ intertextuality, and eventually each of them presents a narrative, framing governments, businessmen, the people, and the virus itself in particular roles. This assumption is explored in the light of Forceville’s (2016) model of pictorial and multimodal metaphor and Baker’s (2006) narrative theory. The study presents a contrastive analysis of Arabic (basically Egyptian) and English (basically American) memes to examine how they operate in both cultures. The results prove the hypothesis, that narratives are indeed presented through memes. They also show extensive use of pictorial metaphors and humour in both sets of data, great similarity in the narratives presented, and heavier reliance on intertextuality in Egyptian memes. 

Keywords

Cairo Studies in English
Volume 2021, Issue 2
December 2021
Pages 206-228

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