The interpretation of the political cartoon: an issue of political culture

Abstract

This research paper aims at describing how a group of college students interpret political cartoons. For this purpose, the text is divided into two parts: the first, is the interpretation of a sample model of Presidential little Palace (PP), Vladdo feature cartoon, published in Semana magazine every Sunday. To do this, we have relied on the theory of illocutionary act of Austin (1962), which refers to the communicative intent of a speaker, and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which present all scenarios of power which overlap after socially constructed discourse. Then, we proposed a group of university students enrolled in the Program of Humanities and Spanish Language, to make an individual interpretation of the same sample. Comparing the interpretations made by students, we found that it is not enough to go to college to acquire political culture. This is a work of individual autonomy, which can be complemented with the academy. The importance of interpretative competence is demonstrated in a world predominantly informative, where the speech reproduces thought systems and plays a decisive influence on people’s social representations.