An
artistic ploy wherein a work refers to, or contains an image of, itself; each dependent image also contains a
dependent image. You see this effect if you stand
between two parallel mirrors.
Some infinite regress implementations:
- April 1965 Scientific American cover (OK, that's obscure.)
- the old Quaker Oats cereal box, with a picture of a Quaker holding a cereal box with a picture of...
- Chinese boxes
- Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
- Someone please add the Johnathan Swift poem, on which Augustus De Morgan based the following:
Great fleas have little fleas
Upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas,
and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas, themselves, in turn,
Have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still,
And greater still, and so on.
- In Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, Philip Quarles is a novelist writing a novel about a novelist writing a novel about...
- More of the same in Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters.
- still more of the same in e. e. cummings' him
- Even more in Norman Mailer's The Notebook.
A Blather of Paradoxes