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217148

Pictorial Metaphors and Narrativity in Coronavirus Discourse

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Last updated: 30 Jan 2023

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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. 

DOI

10.21608/cse.2022.42731.1066

Keywords

Internet memes, pictorial metaphor, intertextuality, Narrativity, contrastive analysis

Authors

First Name

Yomn

Last Name

SharafElDin

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

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

Email

yomnsharafeldin@alsun.asu.edu.eg

City

Cairo

Orcid

0000-0001-9812-0702

First Name

Nihal

Last Name

Sarhan

MiddleName

Nagi

Affiliation

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

Email

nihal_nagi@alsun.asu.edu.eg

City

Cairo

Orcid

0000-0003-3620-4526

Volume

2021

Article Issue

2

Related Issue

30225

Issue Date

2021-12-01

Receive Date

2020-09-13

Publish Date

2021-12-01

Page Start

206

Page End

228

Print ISSN

0575-1624

Online ISSN

2682-2504

Article File

CSE_Volume 2021_Issue 2_Pages 206-228.pdf

PDF . 706.4kB

Link

https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/article_217148.html

Detail API

https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=217148

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12

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Original Article

Type Code

738

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

Cairo Studies in English

Publication Link

https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

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Details

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Article

Created At

22 Jan 2023