Abstract
Stewart’s study offers a way to (horizontally) transcend Stam’s volume—by clarifying key reflexive words and by bringing the literary and filmic examples up to date. Not discussed is Christian Metz’s seminal book Impersonal Enunciation.2 Metz, a founding figure of contemporary film theory, linked reflexivity to enunciation, which he understood metatextually as the activity by which certain parts of a filmic text speak about that text as an act. Metz wrote a nuanced study that is nonetheless limited to Stewart’s categories of the technical and the textual. In terms of Stewart’s phonetic readings of Powers (and Steinbeck), I am reminded of Saussure’s unpublished study of concealed anagrams of proper names encoded in Old Latin poems.3 Are the anagrams intentional, encoded by poets, or are they simply a material fact of language? In his biography of Saussure, John Joseph quotes Saussure who, after three years of study, expressed skepticism to Léopold Gautier (his research assistant) regarding the real or imaginary status of the anagrams: “I rather feel that you will finally remain perplexed, since I do not disguise the fact that I have remained so myself—, on the most important point, namely what one is to make of the reality or the phantasmagoria of the entire affair.”4
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