Imagining Telegraphic Joy in the Canny Cage of Metaphor, Metonymy, and Performativity

The aim of this essay is to explore some of the strengths and limitations of current uses of the rhetorical pair metaphor-metonymy, introduced by structuralism as a fundamental bifurcation. The essay examines whether one version of a new formalism based on Judith Butler's work can reconstitute a tropological plan that offers a better roadmap to the (performative) siting of the subject and of its relations with others as they emerge in the Jamesian text.