Chapter 7
“Lazy reading” and “half-formed things”
Indeterminacy and responses to Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a
Half-formed Thing
Article outline
- 7.1Introduction
- 7.2A Girl is a Half-formed Thing
- 7.3Pragmatics and indeterminacy
- 7.3.1Explicatures and implicatures
- 7.3.2Open-endedness and spontaneousness
- 7.3.3“Manifestness”
- 7.4“Lazy” readings and other responses
- 7.5Accounting for varying responses
- 7.5.1Explicit content
- 7.5.2Implicatures
- 7.5.3Spontaneousness
- 7.5.4Open-endedness
- 7.5.5Characterising readers and readings
- 7.6Summary
-
Notes
-
References
References (27)
References
Armstrong, Isobel (1995). Textual harassment: the ideology of reading, or how close
is close? Textual Practice 9.3, 401–420.
Carston, Robyn (2002). Thoughts and utterances. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Clark, Billy (1996). Stylistics and relevance theory. Language and Literature 5.3, 163–178.
Clark, Billy (2009). Salient inferences: pragmatics and The
Inheritors. Language and Literature 18.2, 173–213.
Clark, Billy (2014). Before, during and after Chekhov: Inference, literary
interpretation and literary value. In Siobhan Chapman and Billy Clark (Eds.) Pragmatic literary stylistics, pp. 55–69, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Collard, David (2016). About a girl: a reader’s guide to Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is A
Half-formed Thing. London: CB Editions.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1994, originally published in instalments 1866). Crime and Punishment, translated by Constance Garnett. Ware: Wordsworth Classics New Edition.
Durant, Alan (1984). Conditions of music. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Durant, Alan (1998). Exploring inferences prompted by reading a very short
story. Perspectives: Journal of TESOL Italy XXIV.1, pp. 45–55.
Enright, Anne (2013).
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride –
review. The Guardian, 20 September 2013. Available at: [URL]
Fetterley, Judith (1978). The resisting reader: A feminist approach to American
fiction. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.
Furlong, Anne (1996). Relevance theory and literary
interpretation. London: PhD. Thesis, University College London.
Furlong, Anne (2007). A modest proposal: linguistics and literary
studies. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics 10.3, pp. 325–347.
Furlong, Anne (2011). The soul of wit: a relevance-theoretic
discussion. Language and Literature 20.2, pp. 136–150.
Grice, H. Paul (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds.) Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. Academic Press, New York: 41–58. Reprinted in Grice, H. P. (1989) Studies in the way of words, pp. 86–116, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Heaney, Seamus (1966). Death of a Naturalist. London: Faber and Faber.
Leech, Geoffrey and Mick Short (1981). Style in fiction. London: Longman.
McBride, Eimear (2013). A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. Norwich: Galley Beggar Press. Republished 2013, London: Faber and Faber.
North, Joseph (2017). Literary criticism: A concise political history. Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press.
Pilkington, Adrian (1992). Poetic effects. Lingua 87.1, pp. 29–51.
Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. (2nd edition 1995).
Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson (2015). Beyond speaker meaning. Croatian Journal of Philosophy XV.44, pp. 117–149.
Wilson, Deirdre (2018). Relevance theory and literary
interpretation. In Terence Cave and Deirdre Wilson (Eds.) Reading beyond the code: Literature and relevance
theory, pp. 185–204, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, Deirdre and Dan Sperber (1981). On Grice’s theory of conversation. In Paul Werth (Ed.) Conversation and discourse, pp. 155–178, London: Croom Helm.
Wilson, Deirdre and Dan Sperber (2004). Relevance theory. In Horn, L. R. and Ward, G. (Eds.), Handbook of pragmatics, pp. 607–632, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Wood, James (2014). Useless prayers: Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is A
Half-formed Thing. New Yorker, September 29, 2014. Available at: [URL]
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Statham, Simon
2020.
The year’s work in stylistics 2019.
Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 29:4
► pp. 454 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.