Is there a general setting for self-reference?

For pleasure only I can at least give you the shortest definition of self reference.

You need only to look in a good dictionary ( from Borges world of course) it says:

Self-reference : see self-reference.

I am not quite sure if it fits the bill but you can also check out:

N. Yanofsky - A Universal Approach to Self-Referential Paradoxes, Incompleteness and Fixed Points

Raymond Smullyan, "Diagonalization and Self-Reference", 1994