Identifying and interpreting visual and multimodal metaphor in political cartoons

Metaphors abound in political cartoons. This is unsurprising, as visual metaphors are excellent rhetorical tools to provide, in one glance, an evaluation of a newsworthy person or state of affairs in the world. Analysts of cartoons, however, are faced with the challenge of examining and categorizing any visual metaphors in a systematic and replicable manner. In this chapter I revisit my own earlier, coauthored work on metaphor in political cartoons (Bounegru & Forceville 2011; Forceville & Van de Laar 2019; Zhang & Forceville 2020), rooted in Black (1962, 1979), to zoom in on criteria for identifying and interpreting metaphors. The chapter, which includes a critical discussion of the visual metaphor identification procedure (VISMIP) proposed by Šorm and Steen (2013, 2018), ends by giving some practical advice to aspiring analysts of corpora of discourses featuring visual metaphors.