The creative minds of Arab cartoonists: metaphor, culture and context

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem

doi:10.1515/text-2021-0100

Article

The creative minds of Arab cartoonists: metaphor, culture and context

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem
Ahmed Abdel-Raheem is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Bremen and a part-time lecturer at both Leuphana University Lüneburg and Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. His articles (30 in total) have appeared in journals such as Semiotica, Language Sciences, Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics and Cognition, Discourse and Society, Discourse and Communication, and Review of Cognitive Linguistics. He is author of the monograph, Pictorial Framing in Moral Politics: A Corpus-based Experimental Study (2019, Routledge). He serves on the board of journals such as Discourse and Society and Multimodality and Society and acts as a reviewer for many other journals, including Text and Talk, Metaphor and Symbol, Language and Communication, Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, Cross-Cultural Research.

Published/Copyright: October 31, 2022

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From the journal Text & Talk Volume 44 Issue 2

Abstract

This article addresses the question of whether context plays a role in creating novel multimodal metaphors. Or, to put the question differently, from where do Arab political cartoonists (as members of several, overlapping or hierarchically related knowledge communities) recruit creative conceptual materials for metaphorical purposes? Specifically, it draws a distinction between direct and indirect sources of metaphor, where embodied experience is classified as direct, and communication (watching TV, reading books and newspapers, etc.) as indirect. Discourse, albeit a major source of human knowledge and hence of metaphor, has received much less attention than it deserves. Using a large-scale corpus of 300 Arabic political cartoons, this study is intended to fill this research gap. It would be difficult to talk about multimodal metaphor without other construal operations such as metonymy and conceptual integration. To clarify the meaning of this, metaphor is seen as a byproduct of blending; and the visual representation of an abstract domain requires choosing a metonym, or chain of metonyms, from a specific domain that in the given context stands for the domain as a whole and that is eminently depictable. Thus, it is of interest to discuss why a cartoonist uses one metonym rather than another. This research is considered relevant for intercultural and cognitive studies, because it also addresses the question of how regional variation in knowledge is related to similar variation and diversity of metaphorical creativity.

Keywords: context-induced metaphor; discourse; multimodal creativity; social-cultural cognition

Corresponding author: Ahmed Abdel-Raheem, University of Bremen, Teerhof 58, Gästehaus der Universität, 28199 Bremen, Germany, E-mail: ahmedelsayed20017@gmail.com

Funding source: University of Bremen

Award Identifier / Grant number: CRDF-Positions No. 23 and 24

About the author

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Bremen and a part-time lecturer at both Leuphana University Lüneburg and Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. His articles (30 in total) have appeared in journals such as Semiotica, Language Sciences, Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics and Cognition, Discourse and Society, Discourse and Communication, and Review of Cognitive Linguistics. He is author of the monograph, Pictorial Framing in Moral Politics: A Corpus-based Experimental Study (2019, Routledge). He serves on the board of journals such as Discourse and Society and Multimodality and Society and acts as a reviewer for many other journals, including Text and Talk, Metaphor and Symbol, Language and Communication, Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, Cross-Cultural Research.

Acknowledgement

This research was made possible by a grant from the University of Bremen (CRDF-Positions No. 23 and 24). There are no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Research funding: University of Bremen (CRDF-Positions No. 23 and 24).

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Received: 2021-07-20

Accepted: 2022-10-10

Published Online: 2022-10-31

Published in Print: 2024-03-25

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2021-0100

Keywords for this article

context-induced metaphor; discourse; multimodal creativity; social-cultural cognition