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How to do things with images: the editor, the cartoonist, and the reader

  • Ahmed Abdel-Raheem

    Ahmed Abdel-Raheem is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany. Before joining the University of Bremen, he held lectureship and research positions at Umm al-Qura University in Mecca, Saudi Arabia (2012-2013) and Marie Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland (2017-2019). He is the author of Pictorial Framing in Moral Politics: A Corpus-based Experimental Study (Routledge, 2018), and has published internationally in a number of journals, such as Discourse and Society, Metaphor and the Social World, Visual Communication Quarterly, Graphic Novels and Comics, Cognitive Linguistic Studies, Information Design Journal, Multimodal Communication, Social Semiotics, Pragmatics and Cognition, Cultural Cognitive Science, and Journal of Pragmatics.

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Abstract

Depending on context: to depict soaring prices as fires is to perform the act of complaining; to portray the perpetrator of a sex crime as a wolf is to accomplish the action of condemning; to draw the ship of state sailing toward catastrophe is simultaneously to perform the action of warning and to issue a prediction; etc. It follows that, if political cartooning is action, then having a cartoon spiked is failure to act. The discussion of silenced speech acts cannot fail to have already been noticed by other scholars. Yet, so far little attention has been paid to this phenomenon, especially in multimodal and intercultural pragmatics. Apart from substantiating the claim that it makes sense to study speech acts in political cartoons, this article investigates the situational factors that may affect the editorial decision-making of a given newspaper. Using a corpus of selected American, British, Egyptian, and Jordanian cartoons, it is argued that the appropriateness conditions of (verbo) visual speech acts (and of discourse generally) depend on the context models of the participants (cartoonists/viewers).

About the author

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany. Before joining the University of Bremen, he held lectureship and research positions at Umm al-Qura University in Mecca, Saudi Arabia (2012-2013) and Marie Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland (2017-2019). He is the author of Pictorial Framing in Moral Politics: A Corpus-based Experimental Study (Routledge, 2018), and has published internationally in a number of journals, such as Discourse and Society, Metaphor and the Social World, Visual Communication Quarterly, Graphic Novels and Comics, Cognitive Linguistic Studies, Information Design Journal, Multimodal Communication, Social Semiotics, Pragmatics and Cognition, Cultural Cognitive Science, and Journal of Pragmatics.

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Published Online: 2020-02-25
Published in Print: 2020-02-25

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