When Ideology Is Visualised: A Study of Cognitive Metaphors and Visual Rhetoric of Cartoons in Egyptian Newspapers

Political and social cartoons reflect the ideology and social perspectives of society. The cartoonist manages to do this using various linguistic and visual tools. These devices are gathered under the umbrella term "Rhetorical devices". Metaphors, speech acts, tones and modalities, lexicalization, tenor and visual rhetoric are important in analyzing cartoons. In this paper, the researcher concentrates on two aspects of rhetorical devices, i.e. metaphor as a semantic aspect, and image as a visual rhetorical aspect. Applying theories of cognitive science to political cartoons shows how the cartoonist can reflect the ideology of the issues he tackles. This paper attempts to treat the interaction between people's cognition and cartoons political messages. The main goal is to highlight the cartoonist’s ideology concerning the cognitive Metaphor Theory and the Rhetorical Visual Theory. For this purpose, two theories are applied to examine the cartoons under investigation. The first theory is Charteris-Black's critical Metaphor Theory (2005), and the second is Sonja Foss's Theory of Visual Rhetoric (2005). Thus, the study aims at tracing the use of critical metaphor and visual rhetoric in cartoons as samples of critical discourse, explaining their conceptual meaning and revealing their underlying ideologies as well