Following Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the figure of the “enthymeme” is understood as a syllogism in which one of the premises is missing or non-valid. Much of the wit of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is based on this figure, and in Stuart Gilbert’s scheme, the technique of the Aeolus episode on Joyce’s Ulysses is listed as “Enthymemic.” But are there narrative phenomena that can be regarded as enthymemes? The paper argues that the notion of the enthymeme is a useful tool for the analysis of reference and signification. In Joyce’s “The Sisters,” in particular, it is a mechanism through which the external and the internal fields of reference enrich each other.

Leona Toker, editor of Partial Answers, is Professor Emerita in the English Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989), Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (1993), Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000), Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (2010), and articles on English, American, and Russian writers. She is the editor of Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (1994); and co-editor of Rereading Texts / Rethinking Critical Presuppositions: Essays in Honour of H.M. Daleski  (1996) and of Knowledge and Pain (2012). Her book Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Inter-Contextual Reading is coming out in the fall of 2019.