Stream of consciousness

In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode that seeks to portray an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her actions. The introduction of the term to describe literature—transferred from psychology—is attributed to May Sinclair, and is mostly a dead metaphor.^{[citation needed]}

Literature

Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow, tracing a character's fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings. Stream of consciousness and interior monologue are distinguished from dramatic monologue, where the speaker is addressing an audience or a third person, and is used chiefly in poetry or drama. In stream of consciousness, the speaker's thought processes are more often depicted as overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself) and is primarily a fictional device. The term was introduced to the field of literary studies from that of psychology by philosopher and psychologist William James, brother of writer Henry James.

Several notable works employing stream of consciousness are:

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground (1864)
• Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1873-77)
• Édouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888)
• Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890) and Mysteries (1892)
• Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time, (or À la recherche du temps perdu ) 1913 - 1927
• Arthur Schnitzler's Lieutenant Gustl (1900), 'Fräulein Else (1924)
• T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
• Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage (1915-28)
• James Joyce's
  • Eveline (1914)
  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
  • Ulysses (1922) - in particular Molly Bloom's Soliloquy
  • Finnegans Wake (1939)
• Italo Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno (1923)
• Virginia Woolf's
  • Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
  • To the Lighthouse (1927)
  • The Waves (1931)
• Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926)
• Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927)
• William Faulkner's
  • The Sound and the Fury (1929)
  • As I Lay Dying (1930)
  • Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
• Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song (1932)
• Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1939)
• J. D. Salinger's
  • The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
  • Seymour: An Introduction (1963)
• William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness (1951)
• Samuel Beckett's 'trilogy' :
  • Molloy (1951)
  • Malone Dies (1951)
  • The Unnamable (1953)
• Albert Camus' The Fall (1956)
• Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londonders (1956)
• William Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959)
• Jack Kerouac's
  • On the Road
  • Visions of Cody
• Jerzy Andrzejewski's Gates to Paradise (1960)
• Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)- particularly Chief Bromden's thoughts during electroshock therapy.
• Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963)
• Hubert Selby Jr.'s
  • Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964)
  • The Room (1971)
  • Requiem for a Dream (1978)
• Albert Cohen's Belle du Seigneur (1968)
• Giuseppe Berto's Il male oscuro (1964)
• Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
• Oğuz Atay's Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected) (1972)
• Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
• Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea's Illuminatus! (1975)
• Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (1975)
• Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony(1977)
• Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980–83)
• Pier Vittorio Tondelli's
  • Altri libertini (1980)
  • Pao Pao (1982)
• Nadine Gordimer's July's People (1981)
• Bahram Bayzai's Death of Yazdgerd (1982)
• Bret Easton Ellis'
  • Less Than Zero (1985)
  • The Rules of Attraction (1987)
  • A Cream Cracker Under The Settee, Alan Bennett 1987
  • American Psycho (1991)
  • The Informers (1994)
  • Glamorama (1998)
  • Lunar Park (2005)
• Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992)
• Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993)
• Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000)
• Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated (2002)
• Will Christopher Baer's Phineas Poe trilogy (2005))
  • Kiss Me, Judas
  • Hell's Half Acre
  • Penny Dreadful (parts)
• Clarice Lispector's whole work.
• Wang Meng's Voices of Spring
• Jack Feldstein's stream-of-consciousness neon animations.
• Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids: The Art of War (1998), an example of a postmodern application of Stream of Consciousness
• Toni Morrison's Jazz
• Joseph Heller's Something Happened

The technique has been parodied, for example, by David Lodge in the final chapter of The British Museum Is Falling Down

Notes

References

• Yorke, Ritchie (1975). Into The Music, London:Charisma Books , ISBN 0-85947-013-X

See also

• Stream of consciousness (psychology)

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