Table Of ContentConsciousness in Modernist Fiction
Also by Violeta Sotirova
D.H. LAWRENCE AND NARRATIVE VIEWPOINT
Consciousness in Modernist
Fiction
A Stylistic Study
Violeta Sotirova
Lecturer in Stylistics, University of Nottingham, UK
© Violeta Sotirova 2013
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction ix
1 The Modernist Revolution 1
2 The Novel of Consciousness 21
3 D.H. Lawrence’s Dialogic Consciousness 54
4 James Joyce’s Extratextual Dialogicity 88
5 Virginia Woolf’s Transparent Selves 126
6 Modernist Style and Contemporary Philosophy 159
Notes 197
Bibliography 202
Index 211
vii
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Continuum International Publishing for allowing me to
use material from my chapter ‘Woolf’s Experiments with Consciousness
in Fiction’, published in the collectionContemporary Stylistics (2007) and
to Sage Publications Ltd for allowing me to use material from my article
‘The Roots of a Literary Style: Joyce’s Presentation of Consciousness
in Ulysses’, published in the journal Language and Literature (2010).
I also wish to acknowledge the expert help of my Palgrave Macmillan
reviewer whose suggestions have proved invaluable.
viii
Introduction
The presentation of consciousness in Modernist fiction is its most
emblematic feature, so much so that the two are inseparably bound in
the equation of the Modernist novel with the novel of consciousness.
Consciousness presentation has been studied as a literary practice of
Modernism that revolutionises the genre of the novel. It has also been
explored as a narrative technique that relinquishes authority from the
narrator to the character. Its linguistic m ake-up has been illustrated by
stylisticians with examples drawn primarily from Modernist narratives.
While critics of both literary and linguistic persuasions have analysed
extensively the Modernist practices of consciousness presentation,
these analyses have mostly focused on the presentation of individual
viewpoints in isolation. Both types of critics have always made an
acknowledgement that one of the striking achievements of Modernism
is the refraction of the narrative through multiple viewpoints. Even
Banfield (1982), the scholar most notably concerned with the linguis-
tic mechanics of single voicing, does not deny that many Modernist
narratives juxtapose different viewpoints, but for her the coexistence
of these different viewpoints is nothing more than juxtaposition. For
most critics the presentation of different perspectives allows the reader
to view the same event or object in the narrative world from different
angles and thus disrupts the coherence of a single unified perspective,
a single unified truth.
This book explores the stylistic techniques that Modernist writers
deploy for the presentation of consciousness, but it goes beyond the
study of style on the level of the sentence or within the boundaries
of individual viewpoints. It explores how viewpoints are juxtaposed
by studying style as discourse and by doing so, it also explores how
viewpoints are interconnected in the tissue of the narrative. While
narratologists as well as stylisticians have studied the linguistic indices
of narrative viewpoint, the linguistic mechanics of interweaving and
dialogically relating different viewpoints have not been examined.
This book offers the first stylistic analysis of the linguistic evidence for
dialogicityy in Modernist novels and shows that the implications of such
practices far exceed the attempt to simply juxtapose different char-
acters’ viewpoints and thereby interpret the narrative world through
different perspectives. Rather than simply c o-existing in the tissue
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