mise en abyme

• mise-en-abyme

From French mise en abyme (literally “placement into abyss”).

mise en abyme (usually uncountable, plural mise en abymes or mises en abyme)

1. (literary theory) Self-reflection or introspection in a literary or other artistic work; the representation of the whole work embedded in a work.
   • 1992, Marie Murphy, Authorizing Fictions, page 80:

     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.

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

     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.

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

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

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

     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.

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

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

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

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

• Droste effect
• strange loop

• mise en abîme

Originally a term used in heraldry, applied to the arts by André Gide.

• IPA^(key): /mi.z‿ɑ̃.n‿a.bim/

mise en abyme f (plural mises en abyme)

1. mise en abyme