Mirror Gazing (Scholarly Series)

Mirror Gazing is a book about reading and looking, about what people seek when they read, and about what stares back at them from the printed page. In one sense, it's an archival project, based on a wealth of material, collected daily by celebrated critic Warren Motte over a period of thirty-five years and squirreled away for some eventual winter. In another sense, it is a love letter, a confession, a tale of deep obsession, a cry for help addressed to anyone who takes literature seriously. It testifies to the way that literature grabs hold of you and won't let go. It is an integrationist work, firmly grounded in the conviction that boundaries between the real world and the fictional world are permeable and easily traversed. It presumes that those worlds comment productively upon each other, and that neither is complete without the other. It argues that "work" and "play" cannot be disintricated when reading is understood as a vital activity. It suggests that what appears in the mirror is not necessarily what one expected to see--neither in the bathroom mirror nor in the mirror of fiction. It hopes to find its way into the hands of a perfect reader.