Self-reference

In literature and film

Self-reference occurs in literature and film when an author refers to his or her own work in the context of the work itself. Examples include Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest and Twelfth Night, 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, Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, Federico Fellini's 8½ and Bryan Forbes's The L-Shaped Room.

Speculative fiction writer Samuel R. Delany makes use of this in his novels Nova and Dhalgren. In the former, Katin (a space-faring novelist) is wary of a long-standing curse wherein a novelist dies before completing any given work. Nova ends mid-sentence, thus lending credence to the curse and the realization that the novelist is the author of the story; likewise, throughout Dhalgren, Delany has a protagonist simply named The Kid (or Kidd, in some sections), whose life and work are mirror images of themselves and of the novel itself.

In the sci-fi spoof film Spaceballs, Director Mel Brooks includes a scene wherein the evil characters are viewing a VHS copy of their own story, which shows them watching themselves "watching themselves", ad infinitum. Perhaps the earliest example is in Homer's Iliad, where Helen of Troy laments: "for generations still unborn/we will live in song" (appearing in the song itself).^[7]

The short stories of Jorge Luis Borges play with self-reference and related paradoxes in many ways. Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape consists entirely of the protagonist listening to and making recordings of himself, mostly about other recordings.

During the 1990s and 2000s filmic self-reference was a popular part of the rubber reality movement, notably in Charlie Kaufman's films Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, the latter pushing the concept arguably to its breaking point as it attempts to portray its own creation, in a dramatized version of the Droste effect.

In art

The surrealist painter René Magritte is famous for his self-referential works. His painting The Treachery of Images, includes the words "this is not a pipe", the truth of which depends entirely on whether the word ceci (in English, "this") refers to the pipe depicted—or to the painting or the word or sentence itself.^[8] M.C. Escher's art also contains many self-referential concepts such as hands drawing themselves.

In popular culture

• Douglas Hofstadter's books, especially Metamagical Themas and Gödel, Escher, Bach, play with many self-referential concepts and were highly influential in bringing them into mainstream intellectual culture during the 1980s. Hofstadter's law, which specifies that "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law"^[9] is an example of a self-referencing adage. Hofstadter also suggested the concept of a 'Reviews of this book', a book containing only reviews of itself, which has since been implemented using wikis and other technologies. Hofstadter's 'strange loop' metaphysics attempts to map consciousness onto self-reference, but is a minority position in philosophy of mind.
• The subgenre of "recursive science fiction" or metafiction is now so extensive that it has fostered a fan-maintained bibliography at the New England Science Fiction Association's website; some of it is about science-fiction fandom, some about science fiction and its authors.^[10]

Words

A word that describes itself is called an autological word (or autonym). This generally applies to adjectives, for example sesquipedalian (i.e. "sesquipedalian" is a sesquipedalian word), but can also apply to other parts of speech, such as TLA, as a three-letter abbreviation for "three-letter abbreviation".

Circular definition is a type of self-reference in which the definition of a term or concept includes the term or concept itself, either explicitly or implicitly. Circular definitions are considered fallacious because they only define a term in terms of itself.^[13] This type of self-reference may be useful in argumentation, but can result in a lack of clarity in communication.

The adverb "hereby" is used in a self-referential way, for example in the statement "I hereby declare you husband and wife."^[14]

Sentences

A sentence which inventories its own letters and punctuation marks is called an autogram.

There is a special case of meta-sentence in which the content of the sentence in the metalanguage and the content of the sentence in the object language are the same. Such a sentence is referring to itself. However some meta-sentences of this type can lead to paradoxes. "This is a sentence." can be considered to be a self-referential meta-sentence which is obviously true. However "This sentence is false" is a meta-sentence which leads to a self-referential paradox. Such sentences can lead to problems, for example, in law, where statements bringing laws into existence can contradict one another or themselves. Kurt Gödel claimed to have found such a loophole in the United States Constitution at his citizenship ceremony.

Fumblerules are a list of rules of good grammar and writing, demonstrated through sentences that violate those very rules, such as "Avoid cliches like the plague" and "Don't use no double negatives". The term was coined in a published list of such rules by William Safire.^[15][16]