stream of consciousnessin literature, technique that records the multifarious thoughts and feelings of a character without regard to logical argument or narrative sequence. The writer attempts by the stream of consciousness to reflect all the forces, external and internal, influencing the psychology of a character at a single moment. The technique was first employed by édouard Dujardin (1861–1949) in his novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888) and was subsequently used by such notable writers as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. The phrase “stream of consciousness” to indicate the flow of inner experience was first used by William James in Principles of Psychology (1890).
a writing technique in which long passages of perceptions, thoughts, judgments, feelings, associations, and memories are written down as they occur without being restructured logically or grammatically by the author.A technique or method in modern narrative fiction which attempts to convey the characters' rambling thoughts. The lectures on speech and thought presentation in my Literary Stylistics module will be useful for the analysis of this technique in modern fiction: see Speech and Thought Presentation and Further Considerations on Speech and Thought Presentation.
