mise en abyme

plural mise en abymes · plural mises en abyme · alternative mise-en-abyme

1. uncountableusuallyA recursive image; an image that contains a smaller representation of itself; especially where the smaller representation itself likewise contains a still smaller representation of the whole image, ad infinitum.
2. uncountableusuallyliterary theorySelf-reflection or introspection in a literary or other artistic work; the representation of the whole work embedded in a work.

   And thus, we can perhaps makes some sense of the narratives he reads as mise en abymes of his own desires.

   2011, Jonathan Boulter, Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel, page 124

   5 more examples

   The narrative mapping of rhetorical strategies between narrator, characters and readers is supplemented by a network of interior duplication with the device of the mise en abyme.

   1992, Marie Murphy, Authorizing Fictions, page 80

   Implicitly, the enunciative mise en abyme reflects an implied author who is attempting to persuade an authorial audience that would identify with the dismayed people.

   1995, Robert L. Brawley, Text to Text Pours Forth Speech: Voices of Scripture in Luke-Acts, page 39

   Herman finds that “the opening poems are as marked by 'linguistic difference' and mise en abymes as the poems addressed to the dark lady.”

   1999, James Schiffer, Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays, published 2010, unnumbered page

   At the risk of some simplification, I understand the mise en abyme to mean a process of representation within representation which points to the mise en abyme of consciousness that produces it, and is engaged with it in the art experience.

   2009, Gregory Minissale, Framing Consciousness in Art: Transcultural Perspectives, page 49

   These mise en abymes serve to maintain the sacredness of K's self, his otherness in the infinitum, as Lévinas might say.

   2011, Irene Marques, Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity, page 160