Ideology and Intertextuality in Covid-19 Memes
Ideology and Intertextuality in Covid-19 Memes

Summary/Abstract: The paper analyses the way in which Covid-19 memes were created during the first wave of the pandemic, paying particular attention to the intertextual links employed and to the ideology that is being put forward through those pieces of digital humour. The corpus for this analysis comprises 180 memes circulated on Facebook and Instagram in the period 13 March 2020 – 30 May 2020. The memes were first thematically categorized into several groups and the specifics of each group were reviewed. As people experienced more or less similar feelings when placed in isolation/under quarantine, these states are considered universal, and this particular study focuses on a sample of 54 quarantine/isolation-related memes circulated in the social media during the first wave of the pandemic. Using CDA and Multimodal Discourse Analysis the paper presents the main trends in their creation along with the established intertextual links and the ideas transmitted. Some of the conclusions reached are that memes employing images of celebrities or popular characters, be they international or local, are easier to decode, while the resort to culture-specific codes and images from movies might prove challenging and, to a big extent, depends on the background knowledge and interests of the recipients.

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