Stream of Consciousness as a Constituent of the Poetic of Spontaneity: Literary and Lingo Poetic Aspects

Abstract

The scientific investigation deals with the stream of consciousness as a constituent of spontaneity poetics in the writings of British and American authors of different literary epochs. The stream of consciousness reflects the complicated and steady mental process of the detailed fixation of thoughts, senses, and unconscious movements. The purpose of our paper is to solve such problems: to explain the notion of stream of consciousness from the spontaneity poetics point of view; to characterize the types of stream of consciousness according to another narrator and the means of thoughts presented in the speech of a character; to trace the ontological transformation of the stream of consciousness in diachronic. Introduced by W. James as a term of psychology, stream of consciousness was established in a literary context by May Sinclair in 1918. Since the modernist time, lingo poetics differentiates between the terms internal monologue and stream of consciousness the grounds of the linguistic organization of the artistic text. Thus, the stream of consciousness defines a narrative method of storytelling by which an author provides a direct reflection of the mental activity of a character. This linguistic poetical technique becomes an imperative element of modernist fiction, and post-modernist prose turns to the sensory-mental pre-reflexive flow, which, in contrast with modernist tradition, reproduces the psychedelic state of altered consciousness or internal mental conflict of the characters. Speaking about the internal structure of the stream of consciousness, we determine the following his three constituents: the primary impulse to think, the thought that the character develops; sudden external circumstances at present that make the consciousness react and alter the thinking; mental transformation determined by the spontaneous associations from the past, often traumatic. Depending on an author's presence in a character's speech, the stream of consciousness can be direct or indirect. According to the way of presenting opinions in the character's speech, there can be the following categories of the stream of consciousness in the fiction text: sensual impression, thought aside, psychological analysis, state of altered consciousness. Each group of stream of consciousness has its peculiar punctuation, the measure of stylistic labeling, specific syntax. Contemporary post-modern literature in English has examples of novels-stream-of-consciousness, which manifests the creative orientation of the writers at the inner world of a human, their sensual-emotional spontaneity through the mean of the stream of consciousness, and the continuous transformation process of the stylistic technique � stream of consciousness � within lingo poetics.