C. S. Lewis’s Laugh at Modernism: The St(r)eam of Consciousness in “The Shoddy Lands”

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Iulia-Teodora Driscu

Abstract

Although C. S. Lewis wrote at a time when Modernism was in bloom, he highly decried this literary movement, clearly expressing his disapproval of the entire paradigm of that age. In the article “On Juvenile Tastes”, he claims that the contemporary literary world showed little concern with the narrative art, but more with literary novelties, a category in which he includes the famous technique of “the stream of consciousness”, which he critically nicknamed “the steam of consciousness”. Even if he never actually used this technique per se, he pretended to do so in the short story “The Shoddy Lands”, which explores the mind of Peggy, a very shallow character. The result is highly amusing and thought-provoking, showing in a literary manner his opinion about Modernism. This paper will analyse some aspects of the short story mentioned above in the light of the stream of consciousness technique and reveal Lewis’s intention in apparently engaging with this modernist psychological narrative mode.

Article Details

How to Cite
Driscu, I.-T. “C. S. Lewis’s Laugh at Modernism: The St(r)eam of Consciousness in ‘The Shoddy Lands’”. Linguaculture, vol. 15, no. 1, June 2024, pp. 75-88, doi:10.47743/lincu-2024-1-0368.
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Articles
Author Biography

Iulia-Teodora Driscu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania

Iulia-Teodora Driscu is a PhD student in English Literature at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania. Her thesis focuses on C. S. Lewis and the revival of spirituality in 20th-century literature. She has completed both her BA in English and French Language and Literature and her MA in American Studies at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi. She had academic Erasmus+ scholarships at the University of Sorbonne IV in Paris (BA) and the University of Strasbourg (MA) and during her Ph.D. she did an Erasmus+ traineeship at the School of English, University of Leicester, UK. She has written papers about C. S. Lewis and human nature, Lewis and his approach to modernism, and about some Romanian writers such as Virgil Gheorghiu. Her research interests centre around the intersection between literature and Christianity in British and Romanian culture.

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