Self-referential

/ˈsɛlf ɹɛfəˈɹɛnʃl/ · adjective

Meaning

That refers to itself or oneself..

Definitions by Sense

1. That refers to itself or oneself.
2. (specifically) In a literary work: referring to the author or the author's other works.

Example Sentences

That is a very pleasant line, the one that we have italicized; […] Why did he [Ben Jonson] not write more such? He might answer that he did, and that his poetry was full of enjoyment. But it is not; at least not in the entirely happy, familiar, unmisgiving, self-referential, and yet not self-loving sense that we speak of.

Self-referential behavior has been defined operationally as the ability of the child to look at its image in the mirror and to show, by pointing and touching its nose, that the image in the mirror there is located in the space here at the physical site of the child itself. In the results reported in both studies, embarrassment, in general, does not occur unless self-referential behavior exists.

What makes Scream so effective, and so timeless, is that it’s both a winking and self-referential breakdown of the tropes of the horror genre and a nearly flawless embodiment of the same.

It [Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy] also has a design strictly self-referential. The author feigns, that the beatified spirit of his mistress has obtained leave to warn and purify his soul by shewing him the state of things in the next world.

Many women authors extend the sort of metafictional self-scrutiny which The Golden Notebook so extensively sustains: Eva Figes's novels, for example, often raise self-referential questioning of their own representational validity and Muriel Spark teases several of her heroines with unsettling awareness of the process of their own creation.

The act of reading and writing and their relation to representation (in general) and literature (in particular) have, of course, received increasing attention over the last several years from authors and critics alike. We have seen a proliferation of self-referential gestures in much recent fiction: an emphasizing of the processes and implications of reading and writing, such as that found in the work of Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino, to name only two of the many authors who come to mind.

Synonyms for self-referential

Antonyms for self-referential

Related Words

Word Forms

• more self-referential
• most self-referential

Usage Notes

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