DOI 10.1515/jls-2012-0010 Journal of Literary Semantics 2012; 41(2): 155 – 173 Billy Clark Beginning With ‘One More Thing’: Pragmatics and editorial intervention in the work of Raymond Carver Abstract: This paper considers Raymond Carver’s writing and Gordon Lish’s edi- torial interventions in that writing from the perspective of an approach to prag- matic stylistics which focuses in particular on inferential processes. Building on some fairly informal classroom work, it considers a small number of specifc dif- ferences between two versions of the story ‘One More Thing’. It considers the con- trasting 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 particu- lar, 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. Billy Clark: Middlesex University. E-mail: b.clark@mdx.ac.uk 1 Introduction The publication of Raymond Carver’s Beginners in 2009 was a major publishing event. 1 It had previously been rumoured, and is now well known, that the origi- nal manuscripts for many of the stories which established Carver’s reputation, including his collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), were signifcantly altered before publication by his editor Gordon Lish. As a 1 I am grateful for helpful comments and discussion to Andrew Caink, John Douthwaite, Anne Furlong, John Heywood, Adrian Pilkington and Michael Toolan, to conference audiences at the Poetics and Linguistics Association conference at the University of Genova in July 2010 and at the Atlantic Provinces Linguistics Association/Association de Linguistique des Provinces Atlantiques conference at the University of Prince Edward Island in November 2010, and to seminar audiences at Shefeld Hallam University and at the University of Westminster. I am also grateful to John Heywood for sharing his teaching materials and information on his own work with students. Brought to you by | Brown University Rockefeller Library Authenticated | 128.148.252.35 Download Date | 12/15/12 4:12 PM