Project: A book entitled Sightings: Mirrors in Texts - Texts in Mirrors, on the function, significance and meaning of chiastic and interlocking structures in French prose fiction. The figure of speech that most resembles a mirror is the chiasmus. The trope comes from the Latin form of the Greek verb meaning to organize in the shape of the letter Chi (=X, a cross, or cross-over). The term denotes a two-part sequence, the second part of which repeats the two main elements of the first in inverted order: ab-ba. Not only do chiastic patterns apply to sentences, such as Quintilian's famous "one does not live to eat; one eats to live," but to paragraphs, short poems, epic poems, Biblical songs,. short stories, novels. Interlocking structure (ab-ba) is a variation of mirror, or chiastic structure. Texts analyzed for their chiastic "armature" are Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678), Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), Balzac's Facino Cane (1836), Barbey d'Aurevilly's Une Page d'histoire (1881), Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-morte(1892 and L'Am des miroirs(1901), Pinget's Lettre morte (1959) and Pierre de Mandiargues' La Motocyclette (1963). Structural analyses of these texts bring to the fore other matters relating to mirroring, questions having to do with mirror scenes, mises en abyme, ekphrasis, "literal" or referential mirrors in texts, the contexts of texts, synchronic and diachronic imbrications of chronicle and fiction in textual productions, framing devices, theoretical problems relating to Lacan's analysis of "the mirror stage," inter- and intratextuality. Micro- and macro- chiastic phrases and structures are causes for reflections upon the meanings of the works sighted. While the trope seems to be singularly tight, or locked up, narratological analyses reveal that the text frequently undermines itself, creating imaginative tensions that have to do with readers' expectations and the subversions of those expectations. Alice in Wonderland and Ovid's Narcissus serve as micro- and macro-paradigms that apply both to the blindness and in-sights having to do with "sightings."