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Both first-person and psychopathological accounts of hallucinations and psychosis tend to acknowledge a difficulty in expressing the phenomenology of such experiences. In particular, it would appear that these forms of experience involve a sense of ontological upheaval, in that they do not conform to the ordinary structure of the experience of the physical, consensual world. Within phenomenology and philosophy of mind, therefore, hallucinatory and psychotic experiences are often used to investigate the norms of our experience of ‘reality’. This study is concerned with novels that take up the ‘linguistic challenge’ presented by hallucinatory and psychotic experience – in other words, novels that attempt to convey what such experience is like. Drawing on reader-response theory, cognitive narratology and cognitive stylistics, I suggest that these novels prompt the reader to imaginatively enact the forms of hallucinatory and psychotic experience through a distortion of the norms that govern the ordinary representation of lived experience. At the same time, these texts also use hallucinatory and psychotic experience in order to explore the nature of the interaction between reader and text, and, more broadly speaking, between subject and world. Although the attempt to convey the experientiality of hallucinations and psychosis is not necessarily confined to the mid-Twentieth Century, this period does present something of a ‘clustering’ of novels which make this attempt through similar stylistic and narrative techniques. Taking William Golding’s Pincher Martin (1956), Muriel Spark’s The Comforters (1957), Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), and Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) as case studies, I explore how these novels engage with conceptions of the mind and reality which emerged during this period, and are thus concerned with phenomenological issues which are still relevant to both cognitive narratology and philosophy of mind. Finally, I suggest that understanding these novels as being phenomenologically oriented can inform the critical debate on the literary history of the Twentieth Century.

Theoretical studies are described on the response of certain structures to acoustic waves. The most general problem treated is the response of a long cylindrical shell periodically stiffened both longitudinally and circumferentially when excited by obliquely incident plane sound waves. Numerical calculations are given for a structure having similar characteristics to an aircraft fuselage. Calculations of the shell vibration and internal sound field are given. A simplified mathematical model, related to the phasing of aircraft propellers, is used to show the effect on the internal sound field due to a phase difference between opposite running plane waves incident on the shell. A procedure is described for calculating the acoustic loading on a rectangular flat plate set in a rigid wall and vibrating in sinusoidal modes. Results are given of the acoustic radiation damping. Wide frequency band space correlation measurements of the pressure field close to a two-inch diameter cold air jet are described. The results are shown to be consistent with the hypothesis that the pressure field close to the jet is convected at a speed related to the local speed in the jet. Using the convection hypothesis a generalised non-dimensional form of the space correlation is derived and both model and full scale measurements are shown to conform. The convection model predicts the form of the narrow frequency band space-correlation function. Tliis function is required for the calculation of structural response to jet noise. An approximate form of this function is utilised in a calculation of the response of a flat panel close to an air jet. Space correlation measureinents in the region within five jet diameters of the orifice of a full scale jet engine exhaust show the acoustic nature of the radiated noise showing the pressure field propagating at the speed of sound as opposed to the near pressure field of the jet turbulence propagating downstream at about one half of the local jet speed.