As one of the oldest and grandest stories of world creation in the indigenous Americas, the Mayan Popol Vuh has been called “the Bible of America.” It tells a story of cosmological origins and continued historical transformations, spanning mythic, classic, colonial, and contemporary times. In this class, we will read this work fully and closely (in multiple translations, with some account of its original K’iche’ Mayan language as well), attending to the important way in which its structure relates myth and history, or foundations and change. In this light, we will examine its mirroring in Genesis, The Odyssey, Beowulf, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Diné Bahane’ to consider how and why epics struggle with a simultaneity of origins and historiography. In highlighting this point of tension between cosmos and politics, we will examine adaptations of the Popol Vuh in contemporary political contexts by Miguel Ángel Asturias, Ernesto Cardenal, Diego Rivera, Dennis Tedlock and Andrés Xiloj Peruch, Humberto Ak’ab’al, Xpetra Ernandex, Ambar Past, Patricia Amlin, Gregory Nava, Arturo Arias, and Werner Herzog. As we cast the Guatemalan-born Popul Vuh as a contemporary work of hemispheric American literature (with extensive North American, Latin American, Latinx, and Indigenous literary engagement), we will take into account the intellectual contribution of Central America and the diaspora of Central Americans in the United States today. As a capstone to our class, we will visit the original manuscript of the Popol Vuh held at the Newberry Library in Chicago, thinking carefully about how this Mayan story of world creation implicates us to this day. (Poetry, Fiction)