The Inward Turn of Narrative

Erich Kahler sees cultural history as a subtle process in which reality plays upon consciousness and consciousness itself is forever transforming reality. He traces the ebb and flow of this relationship by studying changes in narrative form from its beginnings in the Gilgamesh Cycle to the end of the eighteenth century. The general direction is toward a growing inwardness, he finds; what takes place is an expansion of consciousness as man constantly draws outer space, the contents of a more and more complex world, into what Rilke called Weltinnenraum, “inner space.”

Originally published in 1973.

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