Stream of consciousness writing facts for kids

Cover of James Joyce's Ulysses (first edition, 1922), considered a prime example of stream of consciousness writing styles.

Stream of consciousness is a term used in literary criticism for a literary technique that reports thought processes of a person.

That can be done either in context with observation of the surrounding world or without such observations, then it is called interior or internal monologue. Stream-of-consciousness writing is typical for the modernist movement. The introduction of the term to describe literature, transferred from psychology, is attributed to May Sinclair.

Several famous works that employ stream of consciousness are:

• Édouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888)
• Arthur Schnitzler's Leutnant Gustl (1901)
• Nadine Gordimer's July's People
• Shikibu's The Tale of Genji
• Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song.
• Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage (1915-28)
• James Joyce's Ulysses (in particular Molly Bloom's Soliloquy), as well as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Samuel Beckett's Trilogy
• Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves
• William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying
• Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea's Illuminatus!
• William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness
• Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren
• Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn
• Jerzy Andrzejewski's Gates to Paradise
• Will Christopher Baer's Phineas Poe Trilogy (Seen in all of Kiss Me, Judas and Hell's Half Acre and parts of Penny Dreadful)
• Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy
• T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
• Oğuz Atay's Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected)
• Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
• J.D. Salinger Seymour: An Introduction
• Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londonders
• Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time
• William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch

See also

In Spanish: Corriente de conciencia para niños