Beginning with 'One More Thing': pragmatics and editorial intervention in the work of Raymond Carver

This paper considers Raymond Carver’s writing and Gordon Lish’s editorial interventions in that writing from the perspective of an approach to pragmatic stylistics which focuses in particular on inferential processes. Building on some fairly informal classroom work, it considers a small number of specific differences between two versions of the story ‘One More Thing’. It considers the contrasting nature of inferences which each version is likely to give rise to and argues that this approach helps us to understand the nature of the changes. In particular, it helps to understand the nature of Lish’s interventions and to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the extent to which this might be described in terms of a contrast between a more ‘minimalist’ and a more ‘expansive’ style.