Please note where pre-registration is required.

Thinking Through Metaphor: Figurative Language as a Key to Understanding Goethe's Phenomenological Approach to Nature

A talk by Christina Jamison Root, Friday, October 29th at 7:30 p.m. Root is a professor of English at St. Michael's College in Burlington, Vermont. In this talk she will explore how Goethe's approach to nature requires a poet's awareness of the power of language to shape experience. We must become conscious of the figurative dimension of language and of the potential for metaphor and analogy to enrich our vision and understanding. When we practice what Goethe called "exact sensorial imagination," our developing language can match itself to, rather than impose itself on, the dynamic processes of nature. For help with the kind of metamorphosis of ourselves that Goethe's attitude toward language encourages, we will turn to the British Romantic poets and the American Transcendentalists, especially Keats and Thoreau. (Requested donation: $10 - $8 for seniors, students and Friends of the Institute.)