Agency in Ancient Writing by Joshua Englehardt

Author:Joshua Englehardt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Published: 2013-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 6.7. Detail, inscription from an unprovenanced limestone panel (drawing by Nikolai Grube, after Mayer 1987, plate 125).

Again, this is not to say that objects were not conceived of as animate. Speech scrolls emanating from depictions of deities, known to be represented materially by icons and the talking crosses of the Yucatan, are examples of objects that within particular contexts were thought to speak directly to the viewer (Grube 1990). It is unclear if the corpus of writing available to us currently preserves examples of this kind of speech. In the following section I will examine a number of texts that record speech, both internal to the depicted narrative and those directed at the spectator. That is, instead of seeing the presence of first- and second-person and quotative discourse as evidence of the inclusion of the spectator in the same space-time or existential field as the depicted narrative, I make a distinction between first- and second-person and quotative discourse that marks actions between characters internal to the narrative (narrative internal dialogue)—where the viewer is the third-person audience, not an interlocutor in the internal dialogue—and speech (or other actions) directed specifically at the spectator.

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