Perceptual Misalignment: A Theory of Narrative Friction in Modernism

Modernist narrative has long been described either as the triumph of interiority or as the crisis of the subject. Perceptual Misalignment proposes a different account.
Introducing the concept of perceptual misalignment, this study argues that modernist fiction does not simply deepen consciousness nor dissolve it, but exposes its structural insufficiency in relation to the perceptual field the text constructs. What emerges in Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Beckett is a recurrent non-coincidence between point of view and perceptual field—a tension that the book names narrative friction.
Through close readings and theoretical rearticulation of focalization, consciousness, and narrative world, this essay advances a compact theory of how modernist narrative operates when perception exceeds the subject. Misalignment becomes not a psychological defect but a formal principle.
Concise yet rigorous, Perceptual Misalignment offers a new framework for understanding modernism as the site in which perception becomes structural, consciousness functions under pressure, and narration advances through friction rather than psychological development.