From the Stone Painter's Brush: An Anthology, Commentary, and Analysis of Classic Maya Literature, AD 250-900

FAIN: FA-233454-16

Michael David Carrasco
Florida State University (Tallahassee, FL 32306-0001)

A book and the revision of a website on Mayan writing as literature.

In the volume From the Stone Painter's Brush, I present an ethnopoetic analysis of Classic period Maya narratives and prepare translations of and commentaries on a selection of inscriptions. Drawing from the field of ethnopoetics and the ethnography of communication, as well as the artistic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological records, Part I outlines a methodology for textual analysis and presents synthetic discussion of texts across the entire corpus of Maya inscriptions, providing in-depth cultural context to the chapters that follow in Part II. Each chapter in Part II introduces a significant text or series of texts from such text-rich sites as Palenque, Copan, Yaxchilan, Quirigua, Piedras Negras, in addition to a selection of important narratives preserved on ceramics. This volume captures the inventive ways that text and images interact, highlights the poetic and literary nature of Classic Maya writing, and introduces an unprecedented number of texts to a broad audience.

Associated Products

From the Stone Painter's Brush: Chiastic Structures in Classic Maya Poetics. (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: From the Stone Painter's Brush: Chiastic Structures in Classic Maya Poetics.
Abstract: This paper posits the importance of large-scale structures to Classic Maya literature and poetics. Building on discourse analysis, the ethnography of speaking, and ethnopoetics, I analyze a selection of narratives to reveal complex structures that may be divided into stanzas, verses, and framing chiasms based on the internal repetition of parallel structures, some of which are of greater scale than the kenning, couplet, or triplet, so often mentioned in discussions of Maya poetics. These large-scale organizing devices coordinate with the temporal structure of the narrative but are not identical with them, even if both work to frame the central axis of the narrative. The comparison of these large-scale features allows for the identification of an aspect of Maya poetics that has traditionally been understudied, but is nevertheless of critical importance to understanding Classic period literature and verbal art.
Author: Michael D. Carrasco
Date: 11-10-2017
Location: University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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