mise en abyme
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.02 in modern English
20
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
2
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
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
noun
Self-reflection or introspection in a literary or other artistic work; the representation of the whole work embedded in a work.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "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."