The literary movement of Modernism has developed in two main forms: the novel and the short story. The most relevant writer representing the modernist novel is Virginia Woolf; on the other side the most representative author for the modernist short story is James Joyce.

The key word for Modernism is QUEST. Modernist authors always search for new literary techniques, aware that the traditional novel is not able to convey reality as it really is. Indeed, their aim is to represent reality just as they see it.

A modernist literature feature is the focus on subjectivity. Fiction spin around the imperfect being of man, who in influenced by the context he lives into. So the modernist writers draw their attention on their characters’ stream of consciousness, analyzing everything that crosses the character mind.

Virginia Woolf and James Joyce convey the stream of consciousness in different ways.

Mrs. Woolf uses the interior monologue to express the stream of consciousness of her characters. In her novel the narrator is a third person omniscient narrator who adopts a particular character’s point of view putting in evidence all the character’s feelings and thoughts. On this view the reader seems to be in contact with the character and the narrator results to be eclipsed because what emerges from the narration is the “mental magma” of the character’s mind. Sometimes Mrs. Woolf changes the point of view during the development of the novel to give to the reader a different perspective to the same reality.

In Virginia Wool’s novel there is still the use of logical and temporary connectors which let the reader recognize the kind of time; indeed, Mrs. Woolf deals with two kinds of time, the private one and the real one. During the stream of consciousness appears the private time while in the development of the narration the reader could identify the real time.

To convey the flux of emotions and feelings of his characters, Mr. Joyce uses instead the total stream of consciousness technique, consisting in the total disintegration of syntax and in the lack of connectors and logical thread because the reader is asked to understand the semantic connections.

Mr. Joyce, as Mrs. Woolf, uses a language of sense impression to create a prosodic rhythm unifying the whole narration and to report in a realistic way what happens in the characters mind.

Furthermore Joyce’s literature presents two relevant aspects: the paralysis and the symbolical realism.

The paralysis is a metaphor used by the writer to convey the inability of his characters to change themselves, to make decisions and to acts. It is particularly evident in Joyce’s Dubliners, a collection of short stories set in Ireland; Dublin represents the center of paralysis (both from the physical and metaphysical point of view) and its people symbolize the paralysis of mind, always willing to do something but never able to do it.

The symbolic realism is the description of reality throughout the use of symbols. In Joyce’s stories everything has got the function to reveal a deep reality hidden behind the appearances. The symbolic realism lets the reader see the world with new eyes, the eyes of senses.

So the role of the reader is very demanding because the reader is asked to cooperate with the text. James Joyce tries to persuade the reader that there is more about people than we can see.

In his literature, James Joyce has been inspired from the French realism and the classic tradition. He didn’t invent a text ex novo but he created a text beginning from others.