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A Half-Formed Thing, a Fully Formed Style. Repetition in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

Publication date: 19.07.2018

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, 2018, Volume 13, Issue 2, pp. 77 - 88

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843933ST.18.007.8629

Authors

Katarzyna Bazarnik
Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, Gołębia 24, 31-007 Kraków, Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2629-6850 Orcid
All publications →

Titles

A Half-Formed Thing, a Fully Formed Style. Repetition in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

Abstract

The article begins with addressing alleged similarities between Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and James Joyce’s works to suggest that they cannot be systematically sustained. Her much praised, experimental style relies on the opposite of Joycean richness. Limited vocabulary, jumbled word order, and lexical and phrasal repetitions are one of the most salient features of her style. McBride applies rhetorical variants of conduplicatio to create an emotionally powerful idiom to narrate an anti-Bildungsroman about a loving sister and her dying brother, her sexual abuse by an uncle and final suicide. So despite some thematic parallels, and linguistic experimentation, A Girl bears only superficial resemblance to the modernist master, which is additionally evidenced by stylometric findings. 

References

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Information

Information: Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, 2018, Volume 13, Issue 2, pp. 77 - 88

Article type: Original article

Titles:

Polish:
A Half-Formed Thing, a Fully Formed Style. Repetition in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing
English:

A Half-Formed Thing, a Fully Formed Style. Repetition in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

Authors

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2629-6850

Katarzyna Bazarnik
Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, Gołębia 24, 31-007 Kraków, Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2629-6850 Orcid
All publications →

Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, Gołębia 24, 31-007 Kraków, Poland

Published at: 19.07.2018

Article status: Open

Licence: CC BY-NC-ND  licence icon

Percentage share of authors:

Katarzyna Bazarnik (Author) - 100%

Article corrections:

-

Publication languages:

English