stream of consciousness
- noun
- /striːm əv ˈkɒnʃəsnəs/
- Literature
- As film critic for the Village Voice since the 1980s, Hoberman has been our finest interpreter of that stream of consciousness.
- stream of consciousness narration
- stream of consciousness, interior monologue
- stream of consciousness technique
Is he just doing stream of consciousness slam poetry?
- Is he just doing stream of consciousness slam poetry?
- Good keywords to research are journalling prompts, stream of consciousness, morning pages.
- I've been doing these stream of consciousness posts.
- And now here's this, what almost feels like a stream of consciousness that is very well delivered.
- You write stream of consciousness like you're talking, you let it out, you edit it later.
- So then you're sort of stream of consciousness thinking and he's taking notes.
- Like with this stream of consciousness accusation that I'm sure meant something.
- It really, it is stream of consciousness is completely internal to Quentin.
- However, it read more like a literary fiction with like stream of consciousness type of thing than sci-fi ish that it sounded to me.
Examples
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Virginia Woolf often employed stream of consciousness techniques to convey her characters' inner feelings and reflections.
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The novel is known for its unique style, which showcases a character's thoughts in a stream of consciousness flow.
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It's going to be just a long stream of consciousness of just getting a lot of things out.
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All I see is changing streams of consciousness, changing content.
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And now here's this, what almost feels like a stream of consciousness that is very well delivered.
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When Ed talks, it is an intense, hurried stream of consciousness.
Academic text (2015) -
Her stream of consciousness is interrupted when her father tells her to start reciting from the beginning.
Academic text (2018) -
The stream-of-consciousness narration textualizes total involvement with the tale in a most creative way.
Academic text (1991) -
Milly's scrawled postscript resembles her father's stream of consciousness, as if she has inherited his predilection for staccato fragments and halting syntax.
Academic text (2017) -
In modern literature, authors may use stream of consciousness to illustrate the continuous flow of a character's thoughts.
Synonyms
A way a writer shows a character's private thoughts as they happen
How Continuous
Surface Forms
Morphology
stream + of + consciousness
The meaning is a direct compositional metaphor: 'stream' = a flow and 'consciousness' = awareness/thoughts, so together they yield 'a continuous flow of thoughts' which a learner who knows the constituents can infer. Although it names a specific literary technique, the logic is regular and cross-linguistically accessible, making it transparent to B1 learners.
Etymology
Stream of consciousness comes from the picture of a moving stream and the mind's consciousness, meaning 'thoughts'. Imagine water flowing quickly and changing course, like a person's thoughts moving from one idea to another. That's why writers use stream of consciousness to show a character's inner thoughts as they happen.