The Mainstream of Consciousness: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and Mass Modernism

Abstract

The Mainstream of Consciousness: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and Mass Modernism argues that the "stream of consciousness" method which has become synonymous with "high" modernism was, in actuality, a widely accepted and employed trope within interwar popular culture. Instead of considering the ways writers like Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner resisted consumer culture, this project argues that their work both informed and was informed by advertising and best-selling fiction. This project establishes that the modernist "stream of consciousness" method was a "popular" form that was prevalent and widely embraced by the interwar public, that the method appealed to a large audience because it invited identification with a variety of subjective perspectives (or "consciousnesses") which correlate with what film critics have called the "system of suture," and that its dramatization of the instability of the split self (between the "preverbal" or "subconscious" and consciousness) helped create the interwar psychological subject. Each chapter works to historicize the emergence of the "stream of consciousness" as a method and, with Julia Kristeva's conceptualization of the semiotic, to theorize the way these texts informed interwar subjectivity as a dialectic between the rational and communicative and the irrational or "prespeech" level of the "subconscious."