Stream of Consciousness

      Stream of Consciousness is a thought-provoking type of a literary movement because not only does it relate to literature but it also relates to psychology. In fact, it is originally found in psychology. Stream of Consciousness is thoughts and conscious reactions to events, perceived as a continuous flow. If not all then most literary movements go through Stream of Consciousness because it’s something that naturally happens to everyone. It allows the reader to get into the characters mind and understand what they are feeling and thinking.

William James is a philosopher and a psychologist who was the first to coin Stream of Consciousness in his book “Principles of Psychology” in 1890.

However, Stream of Consciousness was not used up until the nineteenth century. This book described the way people respond to daily life through thought and emotion. He argued that thinking does not happen in terms of separate ideas but in fact, theirs is thoughts of mingling ideas that are often stopped and started by things in our environment.

Modern stream of consciousness writing is closely related to, but distinct from, the ‘Surrealist’ concept of “Automatic writing”, which is the process of writing material that does not come from the conscious thoughts of the writer. Surrealism is influenced by the theories of the Unconscious of Sigmund Freud who tried to use automatic writing to avoid the conscious mind and tap into the unconscious. By contrast, modern Stream of Consciousness writing is a literary technique.

The first example of this style is considered to be a novel by Edouard Dujardin "Les Lauriers sont Coupes" (We'll to the Woods No More), but the technique itself was pioneered by Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage (1915-35) and by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922), and further developed by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury (1928).

Virginia Woolf was a popular British author born on January 25, 1882 and died on March 28, 1941. She is considered to be one of the primary figures of both Modernism and Feminism in the twentieth century.  Woolf is considered one of the most psychological of all the Modernists; many of her later novels take place entirely within her characters' heads, focusing solely on the literary technique, stream-of-consciousness. It does not present objective narration, but attempts to replicate the thoughts which shape the character's mind. She wrote a novel called “To the Lighthouse” that explored the minds of the characters using the stream of consciousness technique. This made the characters

thoughts and feelings mix into one another while the outer actions and dialogue come second to the inner emotions and cogitations.

Another novel Virginia Woolf wrote that involved a lot of stream of consciousness was “Mrs. Dalloway”. It was published in 1925 and was bestseller both in Britain and the United States despite its departure from typical novelistic style. Mrs. Dalloway and Woolf's subsequent book, To the Lighthouse, have generated the most critical attention and are the most widely studied of Woolf's novels.

In literature, stream of consciousness writing is a literary device which 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 sensory reactions to external occurrences. Stream-of-consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement. Its introduction in the literary context, transferred from psychology.
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Work Cited:

Foster, Thomas C. "Drowning in the Stream of Consciousness." How to Read Novels like a Professor. New York: Harper, 2008. N. pag. Print.

"The Stream of Consciousness Technique." The Big Read. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2008. 16. Print.

Bradbury, Malcolm. "Virginia Woolf." The Modern World: Ten Great Writers. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking, 1989. 229-52. Print.

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