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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