An exciting investigation of the ways literary and cultural texts have not only shaped the difficult terms of the daughter-father relationship but also prescribed a role for fathers that is paradoxical and contradictory.These 15 essays seek to enter into a new dialogue with both the tenets of patriarchy and with the "initiating symbolic gestures" of feminist discourse that have helped to maintain the father s "voracious and hierarchical" position in western culture. The problem is not simply to change the focus of feminist inquiry from father-as-center to mother-as-center, but to reinvent the discourse of the father, to unsettle an oedipal dialectic that insists on revealing the father as the gaze, as bodilessness, or as the symbolic, and to develop a new dialectic that refuses to describe the father function as if it were univocal and ahistorical."
- ISBN10 0585136041
- ISBN13 9780585136042
- Publish Date December 1989 (first published 22 December 1989)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Southern Illinois University Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 339
- Language English