Signs of the Americas
A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Preface: Threshold Magic
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Unnatural Signs
Chapter 1: World Poetry and Its Disavowals: A Poetics of Subsumption from the Aztec Priests to Ed Dorn
Part I: Pictographic Metonyms
Chapter 2: Pictographic Kinships: Simon Ortiz’s Spiral Lands and Jaime de Angulo’s Old Time Stories
Chapter 3: Pictography, Law, and Earth: Gerald Vizenor, John Borrows, and Louise Erdrich
Part II: Metalepsis and Hieroglyphs
Chapter 4: Hieroglyphic Parallelism: Mayan Metalepsis in Charles Olson’s Mayan Letters, Cy Twombly’s Poems to the Sea, and Alurista’s Spik in Glyph?
Part III: Khipu and Other Analeptic Signs
Chapter 5: Death Spaces: Shamanic Signifiers in Gloria Anzaldúa and William Burroughs
Chapter 6: Khipu, Analepsis, and Other Natural Signs: Cecilia Vicuña’s Poetics of Weaving and Joaquín Torres-García’s La Ciudad sin Nombre
Afterword: Anthropological Poetics
Notes
References
Index
"Edgar Garcia’s Signs of the Americas ranges across disciplines in pursuit of a startling thesis: Nonalphabetic sign systems, such as petroglyphs, hieroglyphs, and even the still-undecoded Incan knot-writing known as khipu, have exerted a decisive influence on the Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Indigenous literature of the Americas. In substantiating this claim, Garcia synthesizes research in an unusually broad range of fields, including literary theory, Indigenous and ethnic studies, anthropology and ethnography, and the history of ideas."
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature | General Criticism and Critical Theory
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