This chapter explores the idea of gendered social performance through the texts of Plutarch and Sima Qian. Chandra Giroux investigates two categories of social performance in particular: friendship and authority, and death and grief. Both categories are approached from the perspective of each author’s own social performance in these scenarios as well as how they represent the social performance of women in them. Through an investigation of Plutarch’s and Sima Qian’s self-representations of their own social performances, she argues that both authors attempt to establish themselves as exemplary figures, ones that focus on the idea of the maintenance of harmony. In this way, Plutarch’s and Sima Qian’s actions are meant as a mirror for their readers’ own lives. In comparison, the chapter analyzes the examples of Timokleia and Timoxena in Plutarch’s corpus, as well as that of Nie Ying in Sima Qian’s work, to explore the authors’ notions of the ideal female reaction to friendship and authority, as well as that of death and grief. In this analysis, Giroux finds that both authors’ representations of women are based in the gender expectations of their respective societies. It is thus the differences between their cultures’ approaches to gender relations that dictate how Plutarch and Sima Qian understood the ideal female reaction to death, grief, friendship, and authority.

Since Bonaventure could not generate an entire treatise out of one Psalm verse, instead we find in each chapter of the Itinerarium a host of divisions and sub-divisions borrowed from earlier texts. Sometimes he borrowed divisions from his own earlier works, especially his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. But in many cases, he borrowed divisions from other works, especially those of the Victorines and St. Augustine. In Chapter 3, “Where Did Bonaventure Get His Divisions?” I trace the sources of Bonaventure’s subsidiary divisions within each section of the Itinerarium and show how tracing these divisions back to their sources can help the reader better understand what Bonaventure is trying to accomplish. I give special attention to the sources of Bonaventure’s key distinction between “vestiges,” “images,” and “likenesses” of God and the distinction between “seeing through” and “seeing in.”

Opening with Leon Battista Alberti’s celebrated definition of painting as a reflection on the surface of the water according to the ancient myth of Narcissus, the introduction elucidates the analysis of the inset-mirror motif in Renaissance painting as a form of mise-en-abyme that was central to the conceptualisation and reception of early modern art.

Rooted in automatism, surrealism spawned a new kind of autobiographical writing, beginning in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism. This new style of autobiographical writing sprang from a desire to identify a lived experience that comprised both waking life and the rich world of unconscious dreams and images. Functioning like Dorothea Tanning’s mirror-door, her preferred metaphor for painting, surrealist autobiographical writing is rooted in everyday reality, within which surreal experiences may surge. Only the autobiographical mode could encompass the multiple voices of surrealism and provide readers with the chance to discover surrealist principles as the surrealists discovered them themselves. This chapter presents a short history of surrealist autobiographical writing, from Robert Desnos’s Mourning for Mourning (1924) and Liberty or Love! (1927), to Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Mad Love (1937), Michel Leiris’s Manhood (1939), Leonora Carrington’s House of Fear (1938), The Oval Lady (1939), and Down Below (1944), Tanning’s Birthday (1986), and Kay Sage’s unfinished China Eggs (1955; published in 1996). These texts show artists and writers seeking self-realization through self-knowledge in the hope of fulfilling Rimbaud’s injunction to ’change life’.

After Wittgenstein, the most immediately visible – though by no means the only – philosopher addressed in Wallace’s work is the neopragmatist Richard Rorty, whose book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature provided the title for one of Wallace’s later stories, a narrative concerned with the nature and revelation of truth. Indeed, the pragmatic concept that truth is a matter of vocabulary became one of the central pillars of Wallace’s own philosophy, as critics, including Hayes-Brady and Tracey, have shown. This chapter offers some context for reading the pragmatic strain that animates especially Wallace’s later works, including treatment of the liberal ironist and the question of the constituted other. Opening with an introduction to the history of the American pragmatic tradition, we move on to consider its direct and implicit presences in Wallace’s work, concluding with the proposal of a pragmatic model for reading Wallace’s writing in both thematic and structural frames.

This paper is detective work. I aim to show that the brilliant Pythagorean mathematician Archytas of Tarentum was the founder of ancient Greek mathematical optics. The evidence is indirect. (1) A fragment of Aristotle preserved in Iamblichus is one of two doxographical notices to mention Pythagorean work in optics. (2) Apuleius credits Archytas with a theory of visual rays which saves the principle that the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence. I argue that the source from which Apuleius got this information was the Catoptrics of Archimedes, the genuineness of which I defend against Knorr’s hypothesis that it is the Euclidean Catoptrics, which had been misattributed to Archimedes. (3) The omission of optics from the mathematical curriculum in Plato’s Republic, and the Timaeus’ wholly physical account of mirror images, can be explained as polemical, for it is well attested that optics was practised in the Academy. The reason Plato does not mention optics is that he objected to Archytas using mathematics to understand the physical world rather than to transcend it.

This chapter reviews five decades of research on reactions to mirrors and self-recognition in nonhuman primates, starting with Gallup’s (1970) pioneering experimental demonstration of self-recognition in chimpanzees and its apparent absence in monkeys. Taking a decade-by-decade approach, developments in the field are presented separately for great apes on the one hand, and all other primates on the other (prosimians, monkeys, and so-called lesser apes), considering both empirical studies and theoretical issues. The literature clearly shows that among nonhuman primates the most compelling evidence for something approaching human-like visual self-recognition is seen only in great apes, despite an impressive range of sometimes highly original procedures employed to study many monkey species. In the past decade, research has been shifting from simple questions about whether great apes can self-recognize (now considered beyond doubt), to addressing possible biological bases for individual and species differences in the strength of self-recognition, analysis of possible adaptive functions of the capacity for self-visualization, and searching for evidence of self-recognition in a range of nonprimate species.

Chapter 5 traces the heart as a polished mirror in transformations of the story of the competition of the artists as told by al-Ghazali and retold by Nizami, Rumi, and ibn Khaldun. Following the episteme of inward mimesis established in earlier chapters, the story reveals reflection as an enhancement of representation rather than through the model of deception common to modern interpretations of Platonic thought under the influence of biblical image prohibitions. The parable reflects insights suggestive of Platonic and Buddhist sources. Tropes of the heart and the curtain, metaphors for the heart and revelation, persist in later poetic renditions by Nizami and Rumi. They add the figure of Mani, mentioned already in Firdausi’s Shahnameh, to the story, elaborated through the thought of Suhrawardi and ibn Arabi. Ibn Khaldun reprises the tale to compare science and mysticism as paths to knowledge. The story reflects a relationship with the image not founded in prohibition so much as in its utility as a vehicle of transcendence. Far from the modern assertion of latent secularism in epic poetry and underlying representational painting, the cultural and religious aspects of Islam emerge as indivisible as a reflection and its mirror.