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mise en abyme is a term used in Western art history to describe a formal technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence.

In film and literary theory, it refers to [the technique] of inserting a story within a story. A [common sense] of the phrase is the visual experience of standing between two mirrors, then seeing as a result an infinite reproduction of one's image. Mise en abyme occurs within a text when there is a reduplication of images or concepts referring to the textual whole. Mise en abyme is a play of signifiers within a text, of sub-texts mirroring each other. This mirroring can get to the point where meaning may be rendered unstable and, in this respect, may be seen as part of the process of [deconstruction]. In literary criticism, mise en abyme is a type of frame story, in which the core narrative may be used to illuminate 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, that is, of the way language never quite reaches the foundation of reality because it refers in a frame-within-a-frame way, to other language, which refers to other language, and so forth.

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