2024年5月15日发(作者：earth地图下载)

Stream of consciousness

In literary criticism, stream of consciousness denotes a literary technique

which seeks to describe an individual's point of view by giving the written

equivalent of the character's thought processes. Stream-of-consciousness writing

is strongly associated with the modernist movement. Its introduction in the literary

context, transferred from psychology, is attributed to May Sinclair.

Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of

interior monologue and is characterized by associative (and at times dissociative)

leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow, tracing

as they do a character's fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings. Stream of

consciousness and interior monologue must be clearly 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 (or addressed

to oneself) and is primarily a fictional device.

The earliest precedent of any literary work using this technique is possibly

Ovid's Metamorphoses in ancient Rome. With its rapid, unconnected association

of objects, geometrical shapes and numerology, Sir Thomas Browne's discourse

The Garden of Cyrus (1658) may, upon examination of its text, be considered one

of the very earliest examples of stream-of-consciousness writing. Another would

be The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne,

(1760). Further examples of the development of this style are The Narrative of

Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1837/1838) and Édouard

Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupes (1888). Tolstoy used something similar to the

stream-of-consciousness technique in Anna Karenina (1877) in the portions

leading to the climax; another early example is Arthur Schnitzler's 1900 short story

Leutnant Gustl. Stream of consciousness writing gained rapid prominence in the

twentieth century. Some of the works of Gyula Krudy (The Adventures of Sindbad)

also employ a technique that can in many respects be considered the fore-runner

of stream-of-consciousness. Famous writers to employ this technique in the

English language include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner.

A few of the more famous works to employ the technique are:

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time

Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage (1915-28)

James Joyce's Ulysses (in particular Molly Bloom's soliloquy)

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying

Jack Kerouac's On the Road