Many Streams: A Critical Review of Modernism’s Divergent Modes of Consciousness

Abstract

This study aimed to present an aspect of modernist aesthetics, namely tracing form and content as exposed through the stream-of-consciousness technique used by different modernist authors, such as Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, and predominantly, James Joyce and William Faulkner. While analyzing the narrative structures of Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury, it is possible to evaluate modernist aesthetics in general, and the various forms of the stream exercised by James Joyce, William Faulkner, and other modernist authors. Woolf explored individuals’ stream of consciousness. Henry James considered the novel as an art form, from which the human existence was enriched. Dorothy Richardson, and her predecessors, including Dujardin, altered the elaboration of the novel through the stream’s perspective, making it their focus. Joyce and Faulkner “were all using ‘the new method’, though very differently, simultaneously” (Richardson 1995, p.282). In Ulysses, the ordinary becomes the essence of the story and the focus is modern human existence through characterless being. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner defines the traumatic incidents of his individuals, leading to the fragmentation of self by way of psychedelic fantasies. Through a qualitative analysis, such as the use of narratology, psychoanalytic criticism of Bergson and William James, and a textual analysis it is possible to convey the divergent modes of modernist consciousness.   

Received: 9 October 2024 / Accepted: 20 December 2024 / Published: 05 January 2025