ENGL 224 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Metanarrative, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Christian Symbolism
Document Summary
The introduction summarizes each chapter and describes the narrative arc of the book, which begins with the subconscious underpinnings of the root metaphor and ends with contemporary calls for vegetal democracy by some thinkers. Initial observations about rootedness presented in this introductory section include the fact that the desire for rootedness is a desire for the existential consolation of strength-giving sameness and that the fear of rootlessness is a fear of decontextualization. Root-seekers are inherently retrophilic; their love of the past fuels a grand narrative of cultural decline. The interest in one"s roots increases in proportion to the perceived level of danger that threatens those roots. People think of themselves most as rooted when something (the foreigner, new values and technologies, forced expulsion) jeopardizes this perceived embeddedness in a culture or a place. Keywords: roots , rootedness , france , germany , nationalism , ecology , metaphor , radicality , context , modernity.
