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.

As with most narratives of catastrophe, the touchstone and point of departure of the narratives of persecution is a state of equilibrium disrupted by an act of violence. Persecution is a disruption of the normal orbit of history and the rituals of any given social body of social state of mind. In a passage from his major post-World War I novel A Guest for the Night (1939), which predicts World War II and the Holocaust, S. Agnon describes this transition from normalcy to the insecure state of the victims of a historical catastrophe.

            Agnon confronts the potentially idyllic normal narrative of bourgeois and Jewish life with the real state of affairs after the catastrophe: the narrative of normalcy is disrupted by the crisis of war and persecution. The time gets out of joint, and life ceases to accommodate the major stations of the process of human change. The narrative has two permanent actants: the persecutor (singular or plural) as victimizer and the persecuted (singular or plural) as victim. The struggle between them creates a diversity of typologies of persecution, but basically it is the conflict between the powerful and the weak. The moral evaluation of the two sides is not uniform. The cat-and-mouse game is not the only legitimate plot; the conflict can be ambiguous – when, for instance the so-called criminal and an innocent victim are one (Jean Valjean in Hugo’s Les Misérables). In some instances the same plot could be interpreted differently by different witnesses: the representative of justice can be justified by one party and accused of cruelty and injustice by another. Shylock in The Merchant of Venice provides a good example of the diversity of interpretations in different times and under different social circumstances. The archetypes of Cain and Ahasuerus, traditionally understood as the fugitive victims of their sins, were reinterpreted as positively by Byron and Stephan Heym. This paper examines the different aspects of the topos and narrative of persecution.

Born in Vienna, Gershon Shaked (1929-2006) was Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the leading experts on Hebrew literature. 

Assuming that the “ontological homogeneity” principle is inherent to the literary work and that the fictionalization of literary referents is its logical derivation, I have coined the concept of “pseudo-real referents” and I show how these referents function in two contemporary Chilean novels: Santa María de las flores negras [Holy Mary of the Black Flowers], by Hernán Rivera Letelier, a text that is consistent with an “aesthetics of totality,” and Amuleto [Amulet], by Roberto Bolaño, a work that on some levels displays an “aesthetic of decentralization or instability.”

In the aftermath of 9/11, dystopian nightmare has become a fact, no longer a cautionary tale of the imagination. But fantasy of destruction is embedded in Western culture, and apocalyptic disaster becomes a re-visioning of familiar cultural paradigms and scenarios. Indeed, postwar America as satirized by Don DeLillo was a site of catastrophe before the planes struck the WTC. The attacks on New York can be seen against the background of postmodern aesthetic theory expounded by Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. Frédéric Beigbeder, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Safran Foer respond to 9/11 in novels that grapple with the implications of that event and its aftermath for representation and for the novel form. What 9/11 has shown is that the relation of the real and the imagined in dystopian fiction has been reversed, as both lived experience and hypermediated image.

The volcanic eruption that occurred in Pompeii almost two millennia ago and the city’s more recent excavation have fuelled the literary imaginations of many great thinkers. This paper examines the evolutions of the motif in the Twentieth Century, through the inter and intratextual meeting of Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold, Sigmund Freud’s “Jensen’s Gradiva and Other Stories” and Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever. The treatment of the Pompeiian motif in these texts suggests that the themes of mourning and loss that inevitably color the tragic event are coupled by themes of desire, longing and hope. The latter are incited precisely where loss has been fixed, and the lost object can no longer be resurrected or found. For Conrad, the Pompeiian image signals a recurring theme of unrequited yearning or impossible love. Consummation is deferred or impeded, eliciting both the protagonist’s and the reader’s desire. Freud describes the manner in which the motif of Pompeii is emblematic of his notion of repression, where the latent exerts its power over the manifest. However, where Conrad delights in delay, Freud expounds the psychoanalytic drive to unmask and recover. In Derrida’s reading, the Pompeiian motif is likened to the figure of the archive which is not only responsible for the preservation of memory, but is also a dynamic force that forms its content as it comes into being. In opposition to Freud, the emphasis is placed not on the past but on the future, on the singular experience of the promise. Although this recalls Conrad’s temporality of deferral, here the promise is not ironized by an underlying impossibility but rather suffused with hope. The juxtaposition of the three writers thus testifies to the paradoxical fusion that lies at the heart of the ancient site. At once past and present, the image of Pompeii endures in the imagination as an object of desire, a figure that can never be possessed.

The article deals with literary constructions of memory of the Holocaust as it happened on the territory of the Soviet Union. This article focuses on the slaughter of Kiev’s Jews in the ravine Babii Iar, September 29--October 3, 1941, the horrifying event that has received the most significant treatment in officially permitted Soviet literature. Complicating the problem of confronting the Holocaust on Soviet soil were two contradictory tasks: 1) the authors’ goal of remembering the Nazis’ deliberately anti-Jewish genocide in the context of their also deliberate anti-Slavic and anti-Soviet designs, and 2) the editors’ and censors’ goal of reasserting a specious Soviet ideology of internationalist, egalitarian “humanism” that held that no nationality should get a preferential treatment. Works discussed range from those of the 1940s (Erenburg, Grossman, and Ozerov), through the 1960s (Evtushenko, Kuznetsov), to the 1970s (Rybakov). 

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot argues that the greatest art is impersonal. His position is undermined by subsequent statements on art as an expression of personality and by his own richly “personal” poetry. This article explores the pattern behind Eliot’s concept of impersonality and its philosophical grounding in his graduate studies in philosophy, arguing that he accepts the simultaneous existence of opposites and sees them as resolved in a dialectical process that at once includes and transcends contraries. The details of this dialectical process vary from artist to artist. Eliot identifies four variations: two in the “Tradition” essay and two in the 1940 memorial lecture on Yeats. The present essay illustrates these variations from the work of four writers Eliot admired – Pound, Joyce, Conrad, and Yeats.

Jewel Spears Brooker, Professor Emerita at Eckerd College, has held visiting appointments at Yale, Harvard, Cambridge, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and (in the fall of 2014) Merton College, Oxford. She is co-editor of two volumes of Eliot’s Complete Prose (2014, 2016), and has published nine books, including Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (1990, coauthor, J. Bentley), Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (1994), and T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews (2004). She has received numerous awards and served as president of the South Atlantic MLA and as a member of the National Humanities Council.

updated: July 19, 2014

The paper begins by examining the structure of a joke as illustrative of the nature of the selection of things, selves, and others from the Real.  The equivocal character of such selections, even in their very singularity, is brought out and is shown to extend beyond that of the Joke, to the Story and to the process of language.  The mismatch of interpersonal positions is shown to depend upon a tacit understanding that apes the structure of trust.  This blind trust is capable of being developed into a genuine one through the acceptance of the irremediable difference of the other and the risk it involves.

This philosophy of narrative is then tested against Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale where the nature of trust or “trouthe” is one of the central moral concerns. The article questions the various approaches to the dilemmas staged in the Tale, particularly with regard to the nature of marriage, since this is a prime example of the tragicomic trajectories of those who engage in mutual acts of “trouthe.”

Yechiel Fajner (also known as Karl Tsetinski, Yechiel De-Nur, and Ka-Tzetnik 135633),  author of six books on the Holocaust, wrote his first book (Salamandra) in Naples 1945. This article deals with the organic connection between the title “Salamandra” and the content of the novel against the background of the author’s Holocaust experience in Nazi ghettos and concentration camps (Auschwitz and Günthergrube). While considering himself a chronicler of the Holocaust, Ka-Tzetnik created a literary style making use of cultural and literary symbols found in world literature and Jewish literature (from the Talmud to modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature). One of his central symbols is rooted in the myth of the Salamander, which in this article is analyzed in detail via a discussion of Ka-Tzetnik’s different sources.

In response to the stern image of Rachmetov in Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863), the interest in which was considerably enhanced by an article coming from the pen of Dmitrii I. Pisarev, three major Russian works of 1868 -- Fedor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, the final installments of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (where Platon Karataev appears), and Alexey K. Tolstoy’s play Tsar Fedor Ioannovich -- create their own versions of what Dostoevsky called “a positively beautiful person.” The three works were responses to a profound inner need felt in the contemporary Russian society, and they implicitly pit Chernyshevsky’s revolutionary version of imitatio Christi against their own hagiographical images in which the saintly opposition to mundane or hegemonic values is combined with a restrained comicality that both invites and distances the sympathy of the reader.