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In:Practising Stylistics: Essays in Honour of Paul Simpson
Edited by Clara Neary, Simon Statham and Peter Stockwell
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 45] 2026
► pp. 97–111

Chapter 8
‘And I was silent’

A pragmatic stylistic reading of John McGahern’s ‘Korea’

 | University of Liverpool
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Abstract
Siobhan Chapman’s chapter commences with a useful overview of the development and the potential of pragmatic literary stylistics. It proceeds to apply neo-Gricean pragmatics in particular — focusing, respectively, on the multi-principled systems of conversational implicature developed by Horn and Levinson, respectively — to John McGahern’s short story ‘Korea’ to offer a principled account of what is ‘implied’, both between the characters in the story and between the narrator and reader. Critical reception of ‘Korea’ has made much of its use of implied rather than direct meaning in constructing the father-son relationship at its heart, yet such criticism has largely failed to locate the source of such meaning. In her application of neo-Gricean pragmatics to this short story, Chapman succeeds both in shedding light on the linguistic strategies which construct indirect textual meaning and in demonstrating once more the value of augmenting literary study with stylistically-informed methods.
Article outline
  • Overview
  • ‘Korea’
  • Pragmatic literary stylistics
  • Pragmatics and ‘Korea’
  • Conclusions
  • References
References (38)
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