At KGOU Suzette Grillot talks to Warren Motte (editor, for example, of Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature), finding Warren Motte Watches Literary Characters As They Watch Themselves, as:
When University of Colorado professor and French literature critic Warren Motte was a graduate student around 35 years ago, he noticed that he kept coming across scenes of people looking at themselves in mirrors in different works of literature.
"I started collecting these scenes, kind of as an antidote to the dissertation that I was writing at the time," Motte says. "I collected these in my reading over the years and finally I ended up with somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 of them."