On the Cultural Meaning of The New Yorker ‘Lawyer Cartoon:’ An Experiment in Ethnography of Communication

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique 28 (4):801-823 (2015)
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Abstract

This essay concerns itself with the Lawyer cartoon, a thematic subgenre of the “The New Yorker Magazine” cartoon, which focuses on the legal profession in the US context. An examination of the cultural meaning of this phenomenon is carried out on the strength of ethnography of communication, which discloses the cartoon as a cultural, social and rhetorical artifact. Among the findings of this study are the structural components, functions, and the rules of configuring the Lawyer cartoon toward it becoming a matter of “risibility” as well as a matter of cultural symbolism. By presenting the attorney as an abnormal character with excessive and hypocritical characteristics, the Lawyer cartoon points to the ascriptions of a disrupted self, making the profession appear as fundamentally inauthentic

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References found in this work

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.Charles Taylor - 1989 - Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press.
The Ethics of Authenticity.Charles Taylor - 1991 - Harvard University Press.
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.Jean-Paul Sartre - 1956 - New York: Routledge. Edited by Sarah Richmond & Richard Moran.
Norms of Rhetorical Culture.Thomas B. Farrell - 1993 - Yale University Press.

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