The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West

Description

Winner of the 2014 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, awarded by the Modern Language Association. Theories of power have always been intertwined with theories of fatherhood: paternity is the oldest and most persistent metaphor of benign, legitimate rule. The paternal trope gains its strength from its integration of law, body, and affect-in the affirmative model of fatherhood, the biological father, the legal father, and the father who protects and nurtures his children are one and the same, and in a complex system of mutual interdependence, the father of the family is symbolically linked to the paternal gods of monotheism and the paternal ruler of the monarchic state. If tragedy is the violent eruption of a necessary conflict between competing, legitimate claims, The Tragedy of Fatherhood argues that fatherhood is an essentially tragic structure. Silke-Maria Weineck traces both the tensions and various strategies to resolve them through a series of readings of seminal literary and theoretical texts in the Western cultural tradition. In doing so, she demonstrates both the fragility and resilience of fatherhood as the most important symbol of political power. A long history of fatherhood in literature, philosophy, and political thought, The Tragedy of Fatherhood weaves together figures as seemingly disparate as Aristotle, Freud, Kafka, and Kleist, to produce a stunning reappraisal of the nature of power in the Western tradition.

Silke-Maria Weineck is Chair of Comparative Literature and Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, USA. She is the author of The Abyss Above: Philosophy and Poetic Madness in Plato, Hoelderlin, and Nietzsche (2002).

The Tragedy of Fatherhood is a tour de force that will open new avenues of research. Although the pater familias is generally considered the model for all figures of authority, his position has gone largely unaddressed in criticism except from the vantage point of the son or the subservient subject. Silke Weineck's elegant and thought-provoking study lifts the father from the shadows and lets him speak as a figure that is at once powerful but vulnerable, the bedrock of the social order but also its most contested member. The book combines an enormous wealth of learning with grace and wit, and is written in a manner that should be the envy of all scholars in the humanities. -- Rochelle Tobias, Professor of German, Johns Hopkins University, USA In this highly reflective and provocative study, Weineck offers a series of consummate literary analyses, which interrogate conventional truisms of psychoanalytic discourse and political theory. With a brilliant shift in perspective, The Tragedy of Fatherhood demonstrates to what extent the figure of the father has been reduced to mere instances of the filial imagination. The result is a richly nuanced and theoretically sophisticated assessment of conceptualizations of paternity throughout the literary and political traditions of the West, which calls for an entire reconsideration of how notions of sovereignty, authority, and legitimacy have been and continue to be formulated. -- John T. Hamilton, Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA The subject of Silke-Maria Weineck's The Tragedy of Fatherhood is central and compelling-the vicissitudes of the 'paternal triad,' the authority vested in family fathers, kings, and gods as concretely imagined in myth, literature, and psychoanalytic theory. Weineck's erudition, especially where Greek and German writers are concerned, her gracious sensibility, theoretical finesse, and writerly flair hold this threatening matter at bay: her critical imagination is a continual source of revisionary insight and complex pleasure. -- Stanley Corngold, Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature, Princeton University, USA This important study is of immense value to any reader interested in the history of family formation, the relationship between antiquity and modernity, the precursors of psychoanalysis in Greek tragedy, and representations of fatherhood in Western culture. -- Anette Schwarz, Associate Professor of German Studies, Cornell University, USA This fresh and original study turns our notions of paternal power and its dominance upside down to argue through texts from literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and political theory that history has been written mainly by the son, who is both heir and victim. Freud, Greek tragedy (Laius, Oedipus) and philosophy (Aristotle) are joined to the Hebrew Bible (Abraham), among others, in order to offer another set of readings, especially of German authors (Hofmannsthal, Lessing, Kleist) that will challenge the reader to think our familiar tropes anew. -- Froma I. Zeitlin, Emerita, Ewing Professor of Greek Language & Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University, USA The Tragedy of Fatherhood is a remarkable book. Its conversational style makes for pleasant reading, and the wealth of material makes the reading profitable. The summary offered here can only suggest its argumentative breadth and depth of learning: Weineck has selected texts and time periods conscientiously in order to provide, not a history of fatherhood, but a reflection on the critical moments that have shaped Western notions of fatherhood vis-a-vis politics, religion, and the family. * Goethe Yearbook * [A]n engagingly written book that offers a broad angle on a topic that never seems outdated ... Weineck takes us on an interesting and ... novel journey through the centuries, delivering her thoughts in an immaculate, captivating style. * Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies * Silke-Maria Weineck's broad yet precise study of the representation of fatherhood in psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and literature has the virtue of making us rethink what we tend to take for granted: the status and definition of the father in Western culture. ... The quality of her insights is enhanced by her graceful prose style, which lends clarity to ideas of great complexity. While her approach is exemplary of thoughtful scholarship, it is clear that she cares deeply about the issues that she raises. * Monatshefte * Ambitious and compelling ... [Weineck's] book offers a powerful revisionist history of fatherhood as a site of crisis and, perhaps more significantly, gives us a new set of tools to think about the relationship between fatherhood and power, or, more accurately, about fatherhood and the forms of disempowerment. * Comparative Literature Studies * Weineck's elegantly written work is not only insightful but also generative. It solicits further pursuit of the relations she draws ... The lines of inquiry that Weineck opens and provokes testify to the strength of her achievement as vividly as the persuasive arguments and readings she sets forth. * Modern Language Quarterly * Illuminating ... If it is beyond the confines of this review to detail the development of Weineck's argument and reading of these texts, it is surely not beyond the confines of the reader's engagement with her book to enjoy and learn from it. * Studies in Romanticism *