Concept

Stream of consciousness

Overview

narrative device used in literature

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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1. Vague and hazy as such an account of our stream of consciousness may be, it is at least secure from positive error and free from admixture of conjecture or hypothesis. An influential school of psychology, seeking to avoid haziness of outline, has tried to make things appear more exact and scientific by making the analysis more sharp.

   William James, Talks To Teachers On Psychology

   The chapter “II. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS” is titled for Stream of consciousness; the author is tied to Stream of consciousness in the knowledge graph.

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2. If we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades.

   William James, Psychology

   The chapter “THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS.” is titled for Stream of consciousness; the author is tied to Stream of consciousness in the knowledge graph.

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3. Sec. 51. Hence, then, the higher forms of speech acquire a secondary strength from association. Having, in actual life, habitually heard them in connection with vivid mental impressions, and having been accustomed to meet with them in the most powerful writing, they come to have in themselves a species of force. The emotions that have from time to time been produced by the strong thoughts wrapped up in these forms…

   Herbert Spencer, The Philosophy of Style

   States what Stream of consciousness is.

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Related ideas

• Alexander Bain (philosopher)
• War and Peace
• James Joyce
• Anna Karenina
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Knut Hamsun
• Laurence Sterne
• Leo Tolstoy
• Modernism
• Marcel Proust
• John Cowper Powys
• Samuel Beckett
• Thomas Hobbes
• T. S. Eliot
• Virginia Woolf
• Literary criticism
• The Principles of Psychology
• Glasgow
• Finnegans Wake
• Henry James
• William James
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Dorothy Richardson
• The Senses and the Intellect

Place in the tradition

Part of American philosophy.

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