Humanities & Social Sciences, Vol 7, No 8 (2014)

Construction of Political “Others” Through Multimodal Texts (Cartoons) in British Press

Liudmila V. Kulikova, Iuliia I. Detinko

Abstract


Cartoons as types of multimodal texts are actively exploited in a media determined political discourse for construction of “others” which is especially characteristic of the British press. In politics “others” can be viewed in two perspectives: intra-cultural and inter-cultural. Intra-cultural perspective presents the relationships between political parties within one culture, e.g. Conservative Party, Labour Party and Liberal Democrat Party within British culture. In the inter-cultural perspective, the attitudes of the particular culture’s politicians towards their counterparts or political groups outside this culture are shown, e.g. Britain’s relationships with Russia, the United States of America, France, etc. The general principles of multimodal analysis being the basic methods for the cartoons interpretation, the idea is that in each of the two perspectives the mechanism of representing the “others” is different. The specific features reveal themselves through the level of interdiscursiveness, emotionality, generalization, detail, use of metaphors, the strategy in frames of which this or that multimodal text contributes to the construction of the image of the “others”.