The Stream of Consciousness in the Modernist Narrative: Linguistic Architectonics and Authorial Implications
Известия Южного федерального университета: Филологические науки February 13, 2020 Ilya S. Korostov
Modernist novels by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf use stream-of-consciousness narration to represent characters' mental activity as a slow flow of thoughts, images, and emotions, verbalizing a kind of psychonarration. Joyce focuses on the Freudian unconscious, while Woolf analyzes thought shifts across time from present to past. Both authors model internal monologues that give readers access to characters' deep mental structures, dreams, fears, and needs, presented as a preverbal phase of speech. The characters reproduce the everyday world through individual perception, creating a phenomenological reality where subjective experience matters more than objective facts, reflecting Schopenhauer's idea that "the world is my representation."