Ukraine’s journey to Europe: strategic macronarrative and conceptual metaphors

Abstract:

Informed by strategic narrative theorisation and cognitive metaphor theory refined and expanded, this paper analyses textual and pictorial instantiations of cognitive metaphors used to describe and explain the trajectory of Ukraine’s development and form a particular narrative of this movement. Both narrative and cognitive metaphor are considered as tools for navigating experience and serving to construe its subjective images.

The study focuses on the ways these tools were used by Ukrainian print media (eight influential outlets) in 2016. The outcomes demonstrate how a coherent strategic macronarrative of Ukraine’s course of development emerges from metaphoric images that survive semiotic mode changes, alternating between textual and pictorial. The macronarrative is that of Ukraine on a hero’s journey towards the European Union – a journey with political and economic implications for both Ukraine and the EU.

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