Stream-of-Consciousness (Literary Terms Related to Fiction)

Stream-of-Consciousness

The term "stream of consciousness," coined by William James in Principles of Psychology (1890), denotes the flow of inner experiences. It has become an indispensable term in literary criticism, referring to a technique that aims to depict the multitude of thoughts and feelings passing through the mind. Also known as "interior monologue," this method has early traces in Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760–7) and long self-communing passages in some 19th-century novels, such as those by Dostoevsky.

In 1901, German playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler highly developed this technique in his novella Lieutenant Gustl. However, it was the minor French novelist Edouard Dujardin who first used the technique influentially in Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888). James Joyce, familiar with Dujardin's work, further advanced the technique in Ulysses (1922), which details the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of two men, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus, during one day in Dublin. Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) also showcases his interest in this technique.

Concurrently, Dorothy Richardson began her twelve-volume Pilgrimage (1915–67), and Marcel Proust worked on À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). Both Henry James and Dostoevsky had previously explored introspective writing, indicating an early awareness of something akin to the stream of consciousness technique. By the 1920s, many writers, inspired by Joyce, adopted and developed this method. Notably, Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), and William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury (1931), became distinguished developers of the stream of consciousness technique.