The Body of Persuasion: A Theory of the Enthymeme

he generally prevailing concept of the enthymeme, or the one most frequent in the world of rhetoric and composition studies, tends to define it either as a of elliptical, informal based on probable rather than certain premises and on tacit assumptions shared by audience and rhetor, or as a of Toulmin argument, or as a general mode of intuitive reasoning representable in syllogistic or Toulminian terms, or, most simply, as the juxtaposition of any idea with another that is offered as a reason for believing it. All such thinking starts from Aristotle's famous dicta that the enthymeme is a kind of syllogism or rhetorical syllogism, and that rhetoric is a counterpart of dialectic (Rhetoric 1.1 1355a; 1.2 1356b; 1.1 1354a).' This prevailing definition, however, has recently been put in question (see in particular Conley, Enthymeme; Gage, Theory). And, as we will see, it is inadequate. In what follows, we will first reexamine the primary (and not exclusively Aristotelian) ancient sources from which a more adequate concept of the enthymeme can be derived. Then, we will consider the relevance of that concept to the analysis of modern discourse-specifically, to the analysis of Roland Barthes' The World of Wrestling and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail, both of which appear in popular anthologies used in composition courses, and both of which provide good examples of modern-but unrecognized-enthymeming.