Self-reference
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Related e |
Featured: |
Contents |
Usage
Self-reference also occurs in literature when an author refers to his work in the context of the work itself. Famous examples include Cervantes's Don Quixote, Denis Diderot's Jacques le fataliste et son maître, Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, many stories by Nikolai Gogol, Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth, and Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. This is closely related to the concept of breaking the fourth wall or meta-reference (which often involve self-reference).
The surrealistic painter René Magritte is famous for his self-referential works. "The Treachery of Images" includes words claiming, in French, it is not a pipe, the truth of which depend entirely on what the word "ceci" (in English, "this") is taken to refer to. Is it the pipe depicted—or is it the painting or even the sentence itself?
Self-reference is also employed in tautology and in licensed terminology. When a word defines itself (e.g., "Machine: any objects put together mechanically"), the result is a tautology. Such self-references can be quite complex, include full propositions rather than simple words, and produce arguments and terms that require license (accepting them as proof of themselves).
Examples
Many of the following examples appear in Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid or Metamagical Themas.
Sentences
Literature
- "beware: do not read this poem" by Ishmael Reed - "the hunger of this poem is legendary, it has taken in many victims"
- The Monster at the End of This Book references itself in the title, as well as throughout the story.
- Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman
- The Cat Who Walks Through Walls by Robert A. Heinlein considers the universe (multiverse) as an author-manipulated object including the plot in the book itself.
- Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder, in which the titular character realizes she is the character of a book.
- The Neverending Story by Michael Ende uses self-reference of the book prominently, when a character (Atreyu) of a story within the story (also called 'Neverending Story') finds a book called the same, and it is the same book the reader is reading.
Movies
- The 1995 movie Living in Oblivion (an independent movie about making an independent movie) has several examples of self-reference.