VIRUS HITS WALL STREET: METAPHORICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC’S ECONOMIC IMPACT IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS
VIRUS HITS WALL STREET: METAPHORICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC’S ECONOMIC IMPACT IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS

Summary/Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic had an immediate and profound impact on economies worldwide, rapidly emerging as a central focus of both news media and editorial cartoonists. Adopting a cognitivist approach to multimodality (Forceville 2020, 2024; Forceville and van de Laar 2019; Silaški and Đurović 2019; Zhang and Forceville 2020), this paper examines the metaphorical representation of pandemic-related financial instability in the genre of editorial cartoons. The dataset, compiled from several online sources, comprises 80 cartoons published globally in 2020 and 2021. The analysis focuses on cartoons that metaphorically depict two key financial concepts – stock market and people’s savings – both of which played a critical role in shaping broader market stability and individual financial security during the pandemic. The study demonstrates how their pictorial and multimodal metaphorical representations facilitate meaning-making of the pandemic’s disruptive economic effects while simultaneously conveying powerful emotional and evaluative messages. It also highlights the pivotal role of metonymy in representing the pandemic’s economic consequences and shaping overall meaning. Finally, the paper contributes to existing research on multimodal metaphor and metonymy in editorial cartoons, illuminating their capacity to reconstruct socio-economic realities in the context of a global public health crisis.

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