The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

present an account of the internal
structure of lines as selections from
the infinite repertoire of rhythm/verse
design juxtapositions which a language
affords.
See Seymour Chatman, A Theory of
Meter (1965); Roger Fowler, ‘ “Prose
rhythm” and metre’ in Essays on Style
and Language (1966); Roger Fowler,
‘What is metrical analysis?’ in The
Languages of Literature (1971); Donald
C. Freeman (ed.), Linguistics and
Literary Style (1970) (the last three
essays); Morris Halle and Samuel Jay
Keyser, English Stress (1971); Derek
Attridge and Thomas Carper, Meter and
Meaning: Introduction to Rhythm in
Poetry (2003); Jeffrey Wainwright,
Poetry: The Basics (2004).
RGF
Mimesis See IMITATION, REALISM,
TYPICALITY.
Mirror Stage, the In 1936 Jacques
Lacan (1901–81) delivered a paper to the
International Psychoanalytic Conference
at Marienbad which introduced his notion
of the mirror phase in the development of
the human subject: ‘The Mirror Stage in
the Formative Function of the I’. The
paper was revised in 1949 and later published
in the collection, Écrits in 1966.
The mirror stage (sometimes called ‘the
mirror phase’) occurs between 6 and 18
months, when the infant is still in the neonatal
state of dependency, awkward and
uncoordinated and without structured language.
From this realm, with its instinctual
drives and diffuse desires (Lacan
calls this the Imaginary), the infant sees
itself reflected in ‘the mirror’ and with
delight, recognizes itself; ‘this jubilant
assumption of the specular image by the
child at the infans stage [. . .] would seem to
exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic
matrix in which the I is precipitated
Mirror Stage 143
in a primordial form’, claims Lacan. The
polished, objectified reflection of a
mirror image is crucial as a symbol or
emblem of this stage and its effects,
although Lacan is also careful to caution
that one should not be too reductive: ‘the
idea of the mirror should be understood
as an object which reflects – not just the
visible, but also what is heard, touched
and willed by the child’. For Lacan, the
stage is the first point at which the subject
misrecognizes itself as a unified, separate
and autonomous individual; the polished
surface and the insecure child’s anxious
projections together present a fiction of
the self, to which fallacy, with its
inevitable fragmentation, lack and obscurity
(to itself as much as to others) it is
always striving. Lacan is building on
Freud’s theories of the unconscious and
his tripartite model of the mind (id, ego
and super-ego) with its desires, conflicts
and repressions. He is also elaborating
Freud’s theories from a perspective
informed by structural linguistics, and, in
particular, by Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857–1913). Thus, one of Lacan’s best
known and persistently puzzling pronouncements
is that ‘the unconscious is
structured like a language’.
Above all, however, Lacan was at
pains to show that the consoling notion
that language was a proficiency acquired
and at the service of the will of the individual
was just as fictive as the unity of
the specular image of the self. Rather,
says Lacan, the subject is inserted into a
language system and is then spoken from
it and by it – at the level of the unconscious
and by virtue of lack and desire.
Freud’s castration and oedipal theories are
also revised as Lacan outlines the child’s
relation to language as part of the complex.
As the child moves from the symbiotic
closeness with the mother s/he
perceives that the mother who had been