It is well established that the internet meme has come to represent a highly creative discursive device used to
“facilitate the […] communication of one’s own political beliefs, attitudes and orientations” (Ross and Rivers 2017: 1). Although internet memes and political internet memes in particular have been addressed to
many communicative situations such as participatory culture (e.g., Jenkins 2006; Shifman 2014; Theocharis 2015), one aspect
that has not been paid enough attention to concerns the forms in which users refer to individual political figures and events in
political memes. This being said, the present paper focuses on referring strategies (see Kirner-Ludwig and Zimmermann 2015; Kirner-Ludwig 2020) as employed in
political internet memes on Reddit, including direct and indirect quotes, citations and allusions. A specific focus is going to be
on such political internet memes that employ pop cultural and telecinematic reference points and recontextualize them from their
original into new target contexts (see Bublitz 2015; Gruber 2019). As shall be shown, practices such as combining constructed speech elements into
recontextualized elements in political internet memes create multiple intertextual references that may enhance visibility,
saliency and, thus, the ‘lifetime’ of a political meme.
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Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
Bülow, Lars
2023. Image Macros als Ressource für sprachliche Verstärkungsprozesse. In Remotivierung in der Sprache [Linguistik in Empirie und Theorie/Empirical and Theoretical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 257 ff.
Bülow, Lars & Michael Johann
2023. Effects and perception of multimodal recontextualization in political Internet memes. Evidence from two online experiments in Austria. Frontiers in Communication 7
Bülow, Lars & Marie-Luis Merten
2023. Multimodale Metaphern im Kontext von Internet-Memes. Korpuspragmatische und kognitionslinguistische Zugänge zu einem soziokognitiven Online-Phänomen. In Digitale Pragmatik [Digitale Linguistik, 1], ► pp. 127 ff.
Kirner-Ludwig, Monika
2023. Book review. Journal of Pragmatics 204 ► pp. 71 ff.
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