Vertiefungsseminar Consciousness Presentation and Representation of the Innermost Do 12.30-14:00

This seminar is already overbooked and the number of places is limited. Therefore, an online registration is unfortunately no longer possible. Im Rahmen des Projektes 'The Marketplace of Words: Linguistics, Literature, and Your Career' -… 'personal consciousness' … to define it … is the most difficult of philosophical tasks.” William James -The novel … for its subject it has, magnificently, the whole human consciousness.” Henry James -A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.” Virginia Woolf When at the end of the 19th century the interest in studying the human mind increased and psychology as a science emerged it was the American psychologist and philosopher William James who coined the term ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe man’s never ending flow of thoughts, ideas, feelings and perceptions. His brother Henry James then was the first to highlight human consciousness and mental processes in his later novels and so paved the way for the development of stream-of-consciousness novels in modernism as known by Virginia Woolf and others. This seminar aims at explaining the development of the literary depiction of these mental processes. It also aims at examining different literary tools available for this depiction, and any confusion around terms such as ‘stream of consciousness’ or ‘interior monologue’ will be removed. We will take a close look at how modern English literature expresses what remains unsaid. Literature: 1. Henry James: The Ambassadors Penguin Classics 2. Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway Penguin Modern Classics Further short stories, excerpts from other novels as well as secondary literature will be provided in the course of the term. Anglistik IV: Modern English Literature Universität Düsseldorf SoSe 2016 Thielen Michaela