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Trenching on the Ground of Fiction: "A Tragedy of Error"

Abstract:This essay develops a rhetorical reading of Henry James's first published and critically neglected story. It links Puttenham's trope of syllepsis to what Hillis Miller terms the antithetical double word, arguing that James's figures of doubleness and duplicity unmoor the distinctions between such binaries as land and water, friend and enemy, self and other, literal and metaphorical, or tragedy and comedy. Driven by the antithetical double words "trench" and "ground," "A Tragedy of Error" stages an oxymoronic comic death. Oedipus Rex is a key intertext for a story whose tropology opens backwards and forwards into James's personal history, fiction, and autobiography.