Seminar 3 Notes

Cojocariu Cornelia
Engleza Spaniola
The Stream of Thought by William James and Modern Fiction by

Virginia Woolf
William James „ The Stream of Thought”

 he was a psychologist who was really focused on the consciousness, the inner self and
the mind;
 what William James writes in these excerpts becomes a valid and extremely used
writing technique by the modernists and not only – „the stream of consciousness”;
 what he wrote about the mind and the thoughts is applicable to what Woolf wrote
because she was interested in writing about the mind, she was not interested about the
outer, superficial world;
 William James talks about thoughts and he says that thoughts are always changing,
always continuous which is why he uses the metaphor of „ stream of consciousness”;
 consciousness = thought;
 our thoughts are inaccessible to others (“My thought belongs with my other thoughts,
and your thought with your other thoughts.”) and we live in a world where they are
not accessible to others without us sharing them („Absolute insulation”);
 thoughts, as we understand by reading the excerpts, are the most personal and raw
things we have as individuals and that’s why Virginia Woolf and the modernists were
so fascinated with the inner life, the inner reality;
 “The universal conscious fact is not 'feelings and thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and 'I
feel.' – this is the subjective reality which he speaks about; the thoughts and the
feelings we experience cannot be taken away from us for they are within us, unless we
share them;
 the subjective world is different from the objective world, meaning the inner world is
distinct from the exterior world, and also what something from the objective world,
like a chair, will inspire in a certain individual might not inspire or mean the same
thing for another individual, exactly because of the subjective reality of each of us;
 he speaks about feelings too “(…) whether I think or do not think, whether I perceive
external things or not, I always have a succession of different feelings” making us
understand that he believed the mind was made up of thoughts and feelings;
 he speaks about them as „atoms” (being a metaphor for impressions) which inspired
Woolf too for she writes in Modern Fiction: “Let us record the atoms as they fall
upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however
disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon
the consciousness.”;
 he talks about perceptions and how they can change based on external factors (the
time of day, the season, the circumstances) or on internal factors (the stage of life
we’re in, the depth of our thoughts etc.);
 the mind is made up by thoughts, feelings, impressions, sensations, perceptions and

experiences that change and the chances we’ll experience them twice is slim;
The connection of William James’ „The Stream of Thought” and Virginia Woolf’s Modern
Fiction
 both in Mr. Bennet and Ms. Brown and in Modern Fiction, Virginia Woolf brings up
similar ideas and concerns: the rejection of tradition, the focus of the novel and the
novel crisis and the differences of how the modernists saw the world and how the
earlier (Edwardians) writers did;
 Woolf was extremely interested in giving the readers access to the inner life of her
characters that otherwise we wouldn’t know only by reading about the external part of
their life;
 she and the modernists wanted to create characters as close to real life individuals as
possible, giving us the opportunity to either find ourselves in those characters or to
learn from them or to reject their way of thinking;
 her characters’ inner lives are composed of impressions, perceptions, ideas, moods,
states of minds (components of consciousness);
 even though there were decades separating them, Woolf was inspired about William
James ideas which makes the fact that she uses terms from his work (see the „atoms”
quote from earlier);
The meaning of Woolf’s statement” life escapes” in relation to the fiction

written by Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy?
 given the fact that Virginia Woolf was interested mainly about the inner life and the
thoughts of characters, by „life escapes” we understand that she refers to the fact that
writers like Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy focus on the outer part of the things when
writing a character, on the objective reality (like the houses, social statuses and so on
and so forth) rather than focusing on the inner part, the less superficial part (like
thoughts, emotions, perceptions);
What is” the proper stuff of fiction”?
 as Virginia Woolf says: “the proper stuff of fiction does not exist.”;
 she explains that there is no wrong or right way to write fiction, to write feelings and
thoughts, she says “break her and bully her”, by her meaning the art of fiction;
 Woolf explains that fiction is flexible and she urges the artists to write no matter what,
only to be innovative in their writing.

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Cojocariu Cornelia

The Stream of Thought by William James and Modern Fiction by

William James „ The Stream of Thought”

 the mind is made up by thoughts, feelings, impressions, sensations, perceptions and

The meaning of Woolf’s statement” life escapes” in relation to the fiction

What is” the proper stuff of fiction”?

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