Stream of consciousness (narrative mode) Watch this page For other uses, see Stream of consciousness (disambiguation). This article is about the literary device. To read about the prewriting technique, see Free writing. In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode, or device, that seeks to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind. Another term for it is interior monologue.[1] The term was coined by William James in 1890 in his The Principles of Psychology, and in 1918 May Sinclair first applied the term stream of consciousness, in a literary context, when discussing Dorothy Richardsons novels. Definition Interior monologueEdit While many sources use the terms stream of consciousness and interior monologue as synonyms, the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms suggests, that they can also be distinguished psychologically and literarily. In a psychological sense, stream of consciousness is the subject‐matter, while interior monologue is the technique for presenting it. And for literature ... while an interior monologue always presents a characters thoughts ‘directly’, without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting narrator, it does not necessarily mingle them with impressions and perceptions, nor does it necessarily violate the norms of grammar, or logic- but the stream‐of‐consciousness technique also does one or both of these things.[5] Similarly the Encyclopædia Britannica Online, while agreeing that these terms are often used interchangeably, suggests, that while an interior monologue may mirror all the half thoughts, impressions, and associations that impinge upon the character’s consciousness, it may also be restricted to an organized presentation of that character’s rational thoughts.[6] Progress and use of the techniqueEdit The beginnings to 1922 While the use of the narrative technique of stream of consciousness is usually associated with modernist novelists in the first part of the twentieth-century, a number of precursors have been suggested, including Laurence Sternes psychological novel Tristram Shandy (1757).[7] In the nineteenth-century it has been suggested that Edgar Allan Poes short story The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) foreshadows this literary technique.[8] Because of his renunciation of chronology in favor of free association, Édouard Dujardins Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887) is also an important precursor. Indeed, the possibility of a direct influence is evoqued by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and having picked up a copy of Dujardins novel [ ... ] in Paris in 1903.[9] There are also those who point to Anton Chekhovs short stories and plays (1881-1904)[10] and Knut Hamsuns Hunger (1890), and Mysteries (1892) as offering glimpses of the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative technique at the end of the nineteenth-century.[11] Henry James has also been suggested as a significant precursor, in a work as early as Portrait of a Lady (1881).[12] However, it has been suggested that Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), in his short story Leutnant Gustl (None but the Brave, 1900), was in fact the first to make full use of the stream of consciousness technique.[13] But it is only in the twentieth-century that this technique is fully developed by modernists. Marcel Proust is often presented as an early example of a writer using the stream of consciousness technique in his novel sequence À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) (In Search of Lost Time), but Robert Humphrey comments, that Proust is concerned only with the reminiscent aspect of consciousness and, that he was deliberately recapturing the past for the purpose of communicating; hence he did not write a stream-of consciousness novel.[14] The term was first applied in a literary context in The Egoist, April 1918, by May Sinclair, in relation to the early volumes of Dorothy Richardsons novel sequence Pilgrimage. Another early example is the use of int
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 15:07:45 +0000
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