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Chapter 4 questions how the common turn-of-the-century practice of listening to the telephone, phonograph, and radio through headphones may have aided modernists in turning up the volume and recording interior monologue—one’s “inner speech” that sounds out within the auditory imagination. Using Jonathan Sterne’s historical study of how headphones created a “private acoustic space,” this chapter postulates that listening to voices and music through headphones created a new sense of a personal and aesthetically objectified space within one’s head. Just as headphones brought unfamiliar sounds and voices into one’s private headspace, James Joyce represents the stream of consciousness as a collage of voices and sounds from literature, religion, popular culture, and the soundscape. In Ulysses (1922), Joyce creates an auditory cosmopolitanism, by allowing the languages and sounds of the surrounding world to penetrate and influence the interior monologues of his characters.

This chapter argues that cognitive fictions expand the focus of the quiet novel, uncovering the complex and often discordant recesses of human consciousness and challenging the traditional division between what is internally and externally felt. This chapter connects the discussion of a quiet aesthetic with early twenty-first century debates about the place of cognitive approaches within literary studies. Indeed, the novel of cognition also recalls the modernist ‘stream’ or ‘novel of consciousness’ whose rich and ambiguous history overlaps with the quiet novels discussed throughout this study.

The debate about the unity of consciousness in split-brain subjects has for the most part been pitched between two positions: that a split-brain subject has a single, unified stream of consciousness, or that she has two streams of consciousness, one associated with each hemisphere. A prima facie appealingly intermediate position, proposed most explicitly by Lockwood, is that a split-brain subject has a single but only partially unified consciousness. Philosophers have overwhelmingly rejected Lockwood’s proposal. In this chapter, Elizabeth Schechter issues a preliminary defense of the partial unity model (PUM) of split-brain consciousness. She argues that the major philosophical objections to that model apply no more to it than they do to the conscious disunity or dualitymodel. In particular, both models imply that a split-brain subject has two phenomenally conscious perspectives, and both raise questions about the relationship between having such a perspective and being a subject of experience.

Chapter 2 connects Dorothy Richardson’s film column for the magazine Close Up, where she criticizes the talkie for its unnatural speech and argues for the importance of the musical accompaniment of silent film, with her fiction, where she pays explicit attention to the prosody of voice and bonding qualities of music. For Richardson, the musical accompaniment of silent film is essential for connecting a viewer with the film while allowing for private meditation; conversely, the awkward enunciation of the speech of the early talkies ruined the aesthetic experience of film for Richardson. Although film viewing is not represented in Pilgrimage (1915–1967), a multivolume work that follows the life of Miriam Henderson through free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, Richardson repeatedly uses moments of listening to music to grant her characters a reprieve in their self-conscious inner speech, prompting them to relax and become more receptive to others. Similarly, the musical quality, or prosody, of voice creates intimacy among Richardson’s characters, allowing them to transcend their selfish concerns and connect with one another.

This chapter explores Henry James’s career-long fascination with portraiture as foundational to his fiction’s ability to imagine new forms of inner life. His portrait fiction dramatizes shifting ideas about human psychology at the turn of the century, especially as those ideas found expression in the debates surrounding materialism, physiological psychology, and the “stream” of consciousness. James’s fiction is more attuned to the body as a cognitive system than most critics acknowledge. James’s portrait fiction plays a central part in the larger reimagination of human subjectivity, psychology, and inner life taking place at the turn of the century, as the physiological psychologies of the nineteenth century gave way to a return of the metaphysical in the form of psychoanalysis.

Richardson’s fictionalised self-portrait in Pilgrimage explores the relationship between personal reality and aesthetic form. By comparing her technique with that of Gosse and James, chapter 5 reveals the extent to which Pilgrimage complementarily combines the traditional structures of spiritual autobiography and the Künstlerroman to supplement the limits of language’s ability to express the self. The discussion focusses heavily on Richardson’s use of language and form, showing how Pilgrimage bursts with fresh ideas and techniques that, ironically, were to establish a new tradition in the form of the stream-of-consciousness novel. It is shown that Richardson’s portrait of the artist lies as much, if not more, in the form of her writing as in the content, as she literally writes the story of herself, her apprenticeship, up to the point at which she begins to write Pilgrimage.

This chapter presents a case study of the autobiographical process as an ongoing interpretive, self-reflexive, and culturally embedded process of meaning formation. The specific “case” analyzed is a mental sequence enacted by Ian McEwan in his novel Saturday. McEwan offers an intricate narrative rendering of the autobiographical process that is used as the fulcrum for a discussion of the nexus of self, autobiographical remembering, and narrative. How would, for instance, a neuroscientist investigate this autobiographical process? And how would a narrative psychologist? It is argued that the combination of psychological and narrative theory is an indispensable complement to the neuroscientific perspective. It is particularly appropriate to explore the dynamic of the autobiographical process because this dynamic is at its heart a narrative one.