Travelling with Ghosts in “Winchelsea, Rye, and ‘Denis Duval’”

This essay develops a rhetorical reading of “Winchelsea, Rye, and ‘Denis Duval,’” whose reflection on the relation between travel and the spectral is structured by aposiopesis, the figure of interruption or stopping in mid-utterance. The ultimate aposiopesis is death, and aposiopesis in its tropological and eschatological implications is both the subject of James’s essay and its central rhetorical procedure. James’s rereading of Denis Duval is informed by the interintrication of travel with the ghostly, memory, and literary tropology itself.