Mise en abyme (also written, mise en abîme) has several meanings in the realms of creative arts and literary theory. The term is originally from the French and means, "placing into infinity" or "placing into the abyss".

In Western art "mise en abyme" is a formal technique in which an image contains a smaller copy of itself, the sequence appearing to recur infinitely. The term originated in heraldry, describing a coat of arms which appears as a small shield in the center of a larger one. See Droste effect. Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... Heraldry in its most general sense encompasses all matters relating to the duties and responsibilities of officers of arms. ... A modern coat of arms is derived from the medi val practice of painting designs onto the shield and outer clothing of knights to enable them to be identified in battle, and later in tournaments. ... The Droste effect is a Dutch term for a specific kind of recursive picture, one that in heraldry is termed mise en abyme. ...

In film, the meaning of "mise en abyme" is similar to the artistic definition but also includes the idea of a "dream within a dream". For example, a character awakens from a dream and later discovers that they are still dreaming. Activities which are similar to dreaming, such as unconsciousness and virtual reality, are also described as "mise en abyme". This is seen in the film eXistenZ where the two protagonists never truly know whether they are out of the game or not. Film is a term that encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the motion picture industry. ... A false awakening is an event in which someone dreams they have awakened from sleep. ... eXistenZ is a 1999 psychological thriller/science fiction film by Canadian director David Cronenberg. ...

In literary criticism, "mise en abyme" is a type of frame story, in which the main narrative can be used to sum up or encapsulate some aspect of the framing story. The term is used in deconstruction and deconstructive literary criticism as a paradigm of the intertextual nature of language, the way language never quite reaches the foundation of reality because it refers in a frame-in-frame way to other language, which refers to other language, etc. Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. ... A frame story (also frame tale, frame narrative, etc. ... Deconstruction is a term in contemporary philosophy, literary criticism, and the social sciences, denoting a process by which the texts and languages of Western philosophy (in particular) appear to shift and complicate in meaning when read in light of the assumptions and absences they reveal within themselves. ... In the work of Roland Barthes, intertextuality is the concept that the meaning of an artistic work does not reside in that work, but in the viewers. ...

The ability of computers to repeat a task without tiring has led to modern forms of this technique: screen savers that fly through space forever, looping and churning tunnels, or unique images such as a commonly-linked animation of David Hasselhoff.^[1] David Hasselhoff as Michael Knight behind wheel of K.I.T.T. in Knight Rider. ...

See also

• Gödel, Escher, Bach
• recursion
• Macbeth (1971 film)

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid: A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll (commonly GEB) is a Pulitzer Prize (1980)-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter, published in 1979 by Basic Books. ... A visual form of recursion known as the Droste effect. ... Macbeth (also known as The Tragedy of Macbeth) is a 1971 film directed by Roman Polanski, based on William Shakespeares play of the same name, concerning the Scottish lord who becomes the king through deceit, treachery and murder. ...

References