Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Another Definition

Stream of consciousness:

* phrase used by William James in 1890 to describe the unbroken flow of thought and
awareness of the waking mind

* a special mode of narration that undertakes to capture the full spectrum and the
continuous flow of a character's mental process

* sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts and memories,
experiences, feelings and random associations

* in a literary context used to describe the narrative method where novelists describe
the unspoken thoughts and feelings of their characters without resorting to objective
description or conventional dialogue

* Eduard Dujardin's Les lauriers sont coupés credited by Joyce as the first example of
this technique

* 'interior monologue' an alternate term
Example:
Anything by Virginia Wolff

Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard submitted by Nathan Stewart

from: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/lit_terms/stream.html

No comments: