Meaning of mise en abyme | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A 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.
   uncountable, usually
2. Self-reflection or introspection in a literary or other artistic work; the representation of the whole work embedded in a work.
   uncountable, usually

Equivalents

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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

CEFR level