: Doreen Fowler
: Drawing the Line The Father Reimagined in Faulkner, Wright, O'Connor, and Morrison
: University of Virginia Press
: 9780813934006
: 1
: CHF 52.80
:
: Belletristik
: English
In an original contribution to the psychoanalytic approach to literature,Doreen Fowler focuses on the fiction of four major American writers-William Faulkner, RichardWright, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison-to examine the father's function as a",borderfigure.", Although the father has most commonly been interpreted as the figure who introducesopposition and exclusion to the child, Fowler finds in these literary depictions fathers who insteadsupport the construction of a social identity by mediating between cultural oppositions.Fowler counters the widely accepted notion that boundaries are solely sites of exclusionand offers a new theoretical model of boundary construction. She argues that boundaries aremysterious, dangerous, in-between places where a balance of sameness and difference makesdifferentiation possible. In the fiction of these southern writers, father figures introduce aseparate cultural identity by modeling this mix of relatedness and difference. Fathers intervene inthe mother-child relationship, but the father is also closely related to both mother and child. This model of boundary formation as a balance of exclusion and relatedness suggests a way to joinwith others in an inclusive, multicultural community and still retain ethnic, racial, and genderdifferences. Fowler's model for the father's mediating role in initiating gender,race, and other social differences shows not only how psychoanalytic theory can be used to interpretfiction and cultural history but also how literature and history can reshapetheory.