Modern readers are experiencing the same kind of situation that mathematicians experienced when Gödel’s theorem burst upon the scene: the object for analysis (the text, number theory) refers self-referentially to that of which it is composed (language, statements within number theory). Like Gödel’s theorem and the Halting Problem, modern fiction tends to place us within rather than outside the frame,9 so that when we speak about it, we are speaking from within the picture that contains us. The resulting paradoxes have sparked important debates and theoretical work in literary criticism.
