Streams Beyond Consciousness: Stylistic Immediacy in the Modernist Novel

The imprecision licensed by the term "stream of consciousness", coined by a psychologist and evoking cognition, is the impression that the literary method we are describing focuses on the mind of an individual. The first problem to confront when discussing this tremendous stylistic shift is the slipperiness of the terminology that has variously been used to designate it. The terms "stream of consciousness" and "interior monologue" are often used interchangeably, and the problem is confounded by the fact that the French typically prefer the term monologue intérieur, whereas English-speakers tend to favor "stream of consciousness." Simply by expanding the category of stylistic innovation in the twentieth-century novel from "stream of consciousness" to "stream of immediate subjective experience," we can see the relation between interior monologue and novels in free indirect discourse that similarly stage individual experience against a larger backdrop, whether that backdrop is cultural, mythic, or literary.