AustLit

'Since the late 1970s Warren Motte, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado, has been collecting mirror scenes in literature, a studiously archived assembly of ‘moments when a subject glimpses himself or herself in the mirror.’ From an analysis of these more than 10,000 scenes collated in Mirror Gazing (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014) Motte suggests that in such instances ‘a curious effect of dissociation seems to be at work, for the face in the mirror typically presents itself to the subject with its otherness prominently on display’; the reflection becomes ‘the deforming mirror of another’s gaze.’' (Introduction)