Towards a Literature of Foundations: Mural Painting and Missionary Theatre in New Spain

FAIN: FT-51660-03

Michael Schuessler
Barnard College (New York, NY 10027-6909)

This project examines factors that shaped artistic and literary expression in colonial Mexico. My book, tentatively entitled A Literature of Foundations: Mural Painting and Missionary Theater in Sixteenth-Century Mexico, is a study of the complex relationships between verbal texts and visual contexts that emerged during the first century after the Spanish Conquest. In this period, the relationship between literacy and legibility--indeed their very definition--take on fundamental cultural significance, and the collision of the ideographical tradition of the Nahuas with the alphabetical system of the Europeans led to a fascinating array of entirely new modes of expression.