Silvia Antosa

Embodied Syntax and Queer Relationality in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) and The Lesser Bohemians (2016)

This article offers a comparative analysis of Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) and The Lesser Bohemians (2016) by examining how each novel mobilises linguistic fragmentation as an embodied mode of narration. Through a queer and poststructuralist critical framework, I read McBride’s syntax as a site where trauma, desire, and relationality are materially inscribed. In A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, fragmentation articulates the somatic pressures of violence and the dismemberment of female subjectivity; in The Lesser Bohemians, it becomes a vehicle for erotic apprenticeship and vulnerable becoming. Drawing on Ahmed, Butler, Sedgwick, Kristeva, Halberstam and Wittig, I investigate how McBride reconfigures formation through corporeal intensity rather than psychological coherence. By placing the two texts in dialogue, I also argue that McBride reimagines the contemporary Bildungsroman as an anti-teleological process shaped by affective entanglement as well as the body’s resistance to normative narrative structures.

Keywords: Embodied syntax; queer formation; trauma and relationality; poststructuralist narrative; Irish contemporary writing; Eimear McBride.