Practice question · Multiple choice
Why is stream of consciousness better described as a representation than as a transcript?
Hints
- Ask what Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated soliloquy would look like if it were genuinely unshaped.
- Selection, ordering and pacing are all present, and all invisible.
Show the answer
C. A real transcript of a mind would be unreadable; the effect of immediacy is produced by artifice
Why
Because the effect of immediacy is manufactured. Molly’s soliloquy has no punctuation and reads as unmediated, yet it is selected, ordered and paced throughout. An actual transcript of consciousness would be incoherent, the technique’s achievement is heavy artifice that reads as none.
Practise Ruptures: Proust, Joyce and Woolf
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More questions on Ruptures: Proust, Joyce and Woolf
- The disproportion between story time and discourse time in these novels is a technical flaw rather than a…
- Which are true of Mrs Dalloway’s narration?
- The Homeric parallel in Ulysses is described as a structural scaffold rather than a message. What follows…
- Match each writer to the technique most associated with them in this lesson.
- How many pages, approximately to the nearest fifty, does Ulysses take to narrate its single day?
- Complete the account of the two clocks.
- Woolf’s "Modern Fiction" argues that novelists should record an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.