Literature is a practice in which authors attempt to advance or renew literature and thus is
always implicitly a reflection on literature itself. But once again, we find that this is
something we could say about other forms: bumper stickers, like poems, may depend for
their meaning on prior bumper stickers: ‘Nuke a Whale for Jesus!’ makes no sense
without ‘No Nukes,’ ‘Save the Whales,’ and ‘Jesus Saves,’ and one could certainly say
that ‘Nuke a Whale for Jesus’ is really about bumper stickers. The intertextuality and
self-reflexivity of literature is not, finally, a defining feature but a foregrounding of
aspects of language use and questions about representation that may also be observed
elsewhere.