Abstract

In this paper I discuss the practices of the production Inventions of the 19th Century, a piece of ephemera from the late 19th centruy belonging to the marketing campaign for Liebig’s Extract of Meat. I approach my corpus from a socio-semiotic perspective, using the tools of Multimodal Discourse Analysis to show how meanings are encoded in the text. On the basis of this description I explore from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis the discursive strategies employed by the producers of these texts to legitimize the ideology of progress and the new identities it involves. In consonance with the aims of CDA, the purpose of this paper is to promote a critical awareness among those who are assigned subaltern positions as passive interpreters of these texts and those who – often inadvertently – play key roles in institutions that participate in the reproduction and legitimization of hegemonic discourses.