Consciousness in Modernist Fiction

Sotirova, Violeta

doi:10.1057/9781137307255

Cited by 67 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…These identify the different techniques used to represent voices and thoughts, classifying them according to specific syntactic boundaries. As Palmer (2004) and Sotirova (2013) suggest, however, these models often appear to simplify the presentation of fictional consciousness, forcing it into categories that exclude expressions of characters’ inners states, which are not readily translatable into articulated thoughts. Sotirova (2013) and Rundquist (2014) propose instead a model that combines a closer linguistic description of the categories of consciousness presentation with increased attention to their semantic effects and on the different facets of the fictional minds they portray.…”

Section: Difficulty Modernism and Free Indirect Stylementioning

confidence: 99%

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Readers’ responses to experimental techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway

Grisot

Conklin

2020

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

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Woolf’s work has been the object of several studies concerned with her experimental use of techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation. These investigated the way in which different perspectives coexist and alternate in her writing, suggesting that the use of such techniques often results in ambiguous perspective shifts. However, there is hardly any empirical evidence as to whether readers experience difficulty while reading her narratives as a result of these narrative techniques. This article examines empirically readers’ responses to extracts from Woolf’s two major novels – To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway – to provide evidence to whether Woolf’s techniques for the presentation of characters’ voices, thoughts and perspectives represent a challenge for readers. To achieve this, a mixed-methods approach that combines a stylistic analysis with a detailed questionnaire has been employed. Selected extracts that were hypothesised to be complex due to the presence of free indirect style and/or interior monologue were modified by substituting these with less ambiguous modes of consciousness presentation, such as direct speech or direct thought. Readers’ responses to the modified and unmodified versions of the same extracts were compared: results show that the presence of free indirect style and/or interior monologue increases the number of perspectives identified by readers, suggesting that this technique increases the texts’ difficulty, laying a more solid ground for future investigations.

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Section: Difficulty Modernism and Free Indirect Stylementioning

confidence: 99%

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Readers’ responses to experimental techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway

Grisot

Conklin

2020

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

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“…Discourse presentation, in particular, free indirect discourse in Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness fiction has attracted considerable interest from linguists and literary critics (Banfield, 1982;Cui, 2014;Ehrlich, 1990;Ikeo, 2015;Lambert, 2011;Sotirova, 2004Sotirova, , 2007Sotirova, , 2013. Quite a few studies do not distinguish free indirect thought from free indirect speech, and use free indirect speech (sometimes free indirect style) as a generic term, under which FIT is in effect a subcategory (e.g., Fludernik,1993;Sotirova, 2004).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Free Indirect Thought in Stream-of-Consciousness Fiction: A Textural Cohesive Perspective

Guo¹

2017

IJEL

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Free indirect thought (FIT) is an important linguistic device to portray characters in stream-of-consciousness fiction. Most studies are concerned with its linguistic manifestations that align the text with the character's point of view, and not much attention is given to the implicit coherence underlying FIT's seemingly disconnected and disorganized structures. Using cohesion theory (Halliday & Hasan, 1985), this article analyzes FIT extracts of the two major characters in Mrs. Dalloway. The analysis is conducted to examine the non-structural cohesive devices and the cohesive chains these devices form and explore their unique contribution to the depiction of characters' thought processes and distinctive personalities.

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“…Fludernik, 1993; Vandelanotte, 2009), but it can also be applied to perceptions and other facets of character consciousness beneath the level of thought, like feelings and states of mind (e.g. Banfield, 1981; Brinton, 1980; Rundquist, 2014, 2016; Sotirova, 2011, 2013). The fact that character-oriented subjective features occur unsubordinated to a reporting clause in FIS means that the character’s subjectivity is expressed directly, as if they were the fictional speaker or ‘locutionary agent’ for that discourse (Adamson, 1998: 662).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cognitive Grammar of drunkenness: Consciousness representation in Under the Volcano

Rundquist

2020

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

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Cognitive Grammar analyses the semantics of linguistic features in relation to human cognition; Free Indirect Style allows authors to represent their characters’ cognition with language. This article applies Cognitive Grammar to the analysis of a character’s mind that is represented with Free Indirect Style. In the tradition of mind style analysis, it aims to use linguistics to reveal some of the underlying cognitive processes and proclivities at work in the character’s psychology. The character in question is the protagonist in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, an alcoholic who is largely characterised by his drunken behaviour and ideation. This article therefore focuses on the linguistic features that serve to represent his inebriated state of mind. It analyses the semantic effects of those features primarily in terms of attentional focus, drawing on Cognitive Grammar concepts, such as objective construal, specificity, scope, profile and domain, and relating these to the protagonist’s cognitive proclivities for solipsism, partial awareness, delayed reaction, attenuated experience and self-delusion. The article also discusses the theoretical background for mind style analysis, arguing for the continued importance of focusing on the relationship between the text and a character’s mind, alongside the focus on the reader’s mind that has come to dominate cognitive stylistics.

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Consciousness in Modernist Fiction

Cited by 67 publications

References 19 publications

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Readers’ responses to experimental techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Readers’ responses to experimental techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway

Free Indirect Thought in Stream-of-Consciousness Fiction: A Textural Cohesive Perspective

The Cognitive Grammar of drunkenness: Consciousness representation in Under the Volcano

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