Father-son Relationship Research Articles

The Search of Safe Harbour from Capitalist Imperialism in Seize the Day

Abstract Seize the Day by Saul Bellow delineates the imperialistic aggression of money creating a society of emotional sterility. Money like an imperialist controls everybody’s everything and all are forced to adore money in this novella. Here the father-son relationship is rounded with the financial successful father and the financially insolvent son as in the case of Dr. Adler and Wilhelm. Only his father cares of how much he earns. His marriage life with Margaret is controlled by money and rounded with his paying premiums of policies without giving emotional soothing. So he is always in search of safe harbour to build a deep human connection with every situation devoid of adoration of ‘Holy money!’ He goes to Hollywood to be an actor for the fulfillment of his wishes, but it remains unsuccessful. He chases his father to be treated as his kid, but his father cares him not as child. Moreover his identity change from Wilhelm Adler to Tommy Wilhelm is to adapt in capital imperialistic society to find a shelter by having free essential self which turns into a failure attempt. He relies on Tamkin for his success in financial war. Tamkin as a means of imperialism has taken the power of attorney over his last seven hundred dollars and captures this little by little placing the mosquito net over his head by visionary ideas and providing all emotional needs which he is eager to have. But his search of safe harbour is continuously torn by the blow of imperialistic tactics of money and is wounded by the moneymaking weapons. This paper aims at how he achieves a safe harbour in funeral of a stranger with ‘happy oblivion of tears’ by creating a wide vision with his compassion and by the recognition of his connection with common humanity out of capitalist imperialism.

Francisco Martínez de la Rosa’s Edipo and Antonio García Gutiérrez’s El paje : Lessons on Penning an Oedipal Drama in 1830s Spain

AbstractThis article compares two Spanish Oedipus plays, Francisco Martínez de la Rosa’s Edipo (1829) and Antonio García Gutiérrez’s El paje (1837), which had divergent popular and critical receptions when they were performed in Madrid during the 1830s. We begin with an overview of the father–son tension in Spanish Romantic drama, a tension that characterizes this particular genre, and the conclusions critics have drawn from this tension. Subsequently, we examine father–son relationships in Edipo and El paje. As we hope to demonstrate, the intergenerational struggle depicted in Edipo, though less faithful to contemporary Oedipal paradigms than in El paje, better conveys the social, political and existential anxieties that Spanish audiences experienced, and for that reason it was more successful.ResumenEste artículo compara dos dramas edípicos, Edipo de Francisco Martínez de la Rosa (1829) y El paje (1837) de Antonio García Gutiérrez, los cuales provocaron reacciones distintas por parte de los espectadores y los críticos cuando se los estrenaron en Madrid durante los años treinta. El artículo empieza con una breve reseña de el tema de la tensión entre padre e hijo que caracteriza el drama romántico español, dando además un resumen de las conclusiones que han sacado los críticos de esa tensión. Posteriormente, se examinan las relaciones entre padre e hijo que encontramos en Edipo y El paje. Finalmente, sostenemos que el conflicto intergeneracional en Edipo, aunque es menos fiel a los paradigmas edípicos contemporáneos, expresa mejor las ansiedades sociales, políticas y existenciales que experimentaban los espectadores españoles durante esa época y por eso el drama fue más exitoso.

African-American Fathers' Perspectives on Facilitators and Barriers to Father-Son Sexual Health Communication.

African-American males ages 13 through 24 are disproportionately affected by sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), accounting for over half of all HIV infections in this age group in the United States. Clear communication between African-American parents and their youth about sexual health is associated with higher rates of sexual abstinence, condom use, and intent to delay initiation of sexual intercourse. However, little is known about African-American fathers' perceptions of what facilitates and inhibits sexual health communication with their preadolescent and adolescent sons. We conducted focus groups with 29 African-American fathers of sons ages 10-15 to explore perceived facilitators and barriers for father-son communication about sexual health. Participants were recruited from barbershops in metropolitan and rural North Carolina communities highly affected by STIs and HIV, and data were analyzed using content analysis. Three factors facilitated father-son communication: (a) fathers' acceptance of their roles and responsibilities; (b) a positive father-son relationship; and (c) fathers' ability to speak directly to their sons about sex. We also identified three barriers: (a) fathers' difficulty in initiating sexual health discussions with their sons; (b) sons' developmental readiness for sexual health information; and (c) fathers' lack of experience in talking with their own fathers about sex. These findings have implications for father-focused prevention interventions aimed at reducing risky sexual behaviors in adolescent African-American males. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

‘Anehnja hubungan ajah dan anak ini’

ABSTRACTThis article asks to what extent the depiction of father-son relationships in works by Pramoedya Ananta Toer published up to 1952 reflects what we know of his relationship with his father during those years. It finds that four works written between 1945 and 1949, when Pramoedya had little contact with a father with whom his relations had been difficult, contain negative portraits of fathers, including, in one case, Pramoedya’s own father and, in another, a character substantially modelled on his father. There is a marked change of attitude in Bukan pasar malam (It’s not an all night fair), Pramoedya’s account of his visit to his dying father, when sympathy and respect for his father as man and nationalist dominate the author’s feelings. Something of this change of attitude remains in two stories from the collection Cerita dari Blora (Tales from Blora) which recount Pramoedya’s own childhood memories of his family, but echoes of the tensions between father and son remain in other stories from that collection. So, it appears, do they in Bumi manusia (This earth of mankind), the first volume of Pramoedya’s late major work, the Buru quartet.

Transformative Father-Son Relationships as Coping Mechanisms among Representations of Black Same-Gender-Loving Sons in American Television and Literary Narratives

Black fathers have traditionally served key roles in racial and masculine identity development among their sons. Struggles of racial injustice and hegemonic masculinst customs have impacted the manner in which paternal messages of identity development have been relayed to Black sons. As a result, Black same-gender-loving (SGL) sons often face a high level of distress based on their failure to conform to mainstream masculinities and experiences of racial disenfranchisement. Through examining narratives in mainstream television and popular literature, this study examines the manner in which transformative Black father-son relationships serve as therapeutic coping mechanisms that assist Black SGL sons in overcoming physically and psychologically traumatic experiences to attain self-acceptance.

Croatian War Nocturnal by Sebastian Schulman

obsessed with the stories of Oedipus, Rostam , and Sohrab. Thirty years later, Cem returns to Ongoren despite ill omens, to discover his destiny and to meet Enver, the narrator of the novel. The entwined stories of fathers and sons take unexpected turns and proceed like the epics that have long shaped Cem’s life. Pamuk’s readers will no doubt recognize the presence of his past works in this novel. Enver’s voice resonates with the assassin’s voice in Snow, Rostam and Sohrab’s story and the traveling theater company will bring back lines from the same novel; readers may find themselves hearing the cracking skull of a calligrapher in a sixteenth-century Ottoman well (My Name Is Red). Instead of the Venetians and Ottomans of the White Castle, it is Sophocles ’ Oedipus Rex and the Iranian poet Ferdowsi ’s Rostam and Sohrab that are gazing at each other, negotiating deep-seated fears about patriarchy in the East and West. Like Füsun, the red-haired woman, Gülcihan, despite her presence on the Turkish cover of the novel, is no more than a subject of desire. And Cem says his life changes after he reads a book on dreams, a statement that brings to mind the unforgettable opening sentence of The New Life. Despite its familiarity, however, The RedHaired Woman is a haunting and unprecedented novel. Pamuk’s mischievousness and playfulness are at a minimum, perhaps nonexistent. The murders in the book are sketched against a background of ancient epics and stories that create for the reader the illusion of a closed system, where one feels the weight of predestination and trauma in any troubled father-son relationship. Cem, who is a Poe fan in the story, immures himself with these classical stories, making the detective murder story within the novel even more evocative. In his shortest novel to date, Pamuk leaves the reader with questions about his choices in storytelling and his late style. For instance, the changing of the book title from The Well to The Red-Haired Woman means giving up a perfectly Freudian metaphor that captures the subtle threads in the book. This relatively late change in the title seems to coincide with the inclusion of Gülcihan as one of the narrators in the story and Pamuk’s decision to have a woman amid heavily patriarchal voices. This dominant patriarchal tone is reiterated with the presence and inclusion of the Western canon, from Hamlet to Rousseau and Jules Verne. In this way, the red-haired woman exists as a mysterious, iconic figure , represented by a Rossetti painting, reduced to a book dedication, and caught up in an Oedipal net. Iclal Vanwesenbeeck SUNY Fredonia Spomenka Štimec. Croatian War Nocturnal. Trans. Sebastian Schulman. Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 120 pages. The Balkan Wars spawned literature across genres, in languages from émigré English and German to nascent Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian. But Spomenka Štimec’s “fictional memoir” occupies a unique position. Defying the outcome of that war—six new nations, each comprising a dialect with an army—its language, Esperanto, from sperare (to hope), also functions as its theme. Each word embodies the aim of Zamenhof, who founded Esperanto in 1887 to transcend national boundaries and unite the world. Esperanto connects the eleven segments of this nocturnal (not a diary, its Latin root, nox / night, opposing dia / day) that capture the dark realities of the time. The typewriter of Štimec’s persona belonged to the Distributed Language Translation Project, a Dutch effort from 1985 to 1990 to enable machine translation using Esperanto as the intermediary language. On it this Esperanto Center employee, her visits to Serbia “a trip to our Croatian great-grandmother,” her annual holidays with Serbian cousins a “circle of harmony,” nightly records her experiences—Zagreb’s air raids, Vukovar’s destruction, Sarajevo’s siege, blossoming nationalism, separation from family, the death or disappearance of Esperanto colleagues. In Štimec’s epigrammatic style, irony both mediates and underscores horror, highlighting the absurd consequences of war (e.g., the hurdles faced when trying to ship a dead soldier’s body to his native France, revealing “the politics of storing the dead,” or the endless steps required to...

In nomine patris: Discursive strategies and ideology in the Cosa Nostra family discourse

The article investigates how Cosa Nostra family discourse is characterized by a series of discursive strategies that give shape to specific ideological structures. By analysing a TV interview to the son of Bernardo Provenzano, boss of Cosa Nostra, it is possible to understand how the criminal values and practices are maintained and reproduced within the father–son relationship. Specifically, we show how the son justifies, legitimises or denies the criminal actions of his father. The ideology of Cosa Nostra seems to be based on the inter-generational cultural continuity of its members, on the family as main locus of adherence, reductionism of its mediatic image, amoralism as father–son relational constant and verticalism of the organisation as key framing device.

D.H. Lawrence ve Baba Katilliği

D. H. Lawrence
 (1885-1930) is an English writer and poet of the 20th century. He wrote many
 novels, short stories, and poems reflecting human psychology. His short story
 “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is an autobiographical work delineating the
 mother-son and father-son relationships with reference to the Freudian theory
 of “patricide”. Therefore, this article portrays how the protagonist of the
 short story resembles Lawrence himself in the sense that they both kill their
 fathers symbolically.  

Half Bad by S. Green

Green, Sally. Half Bad. New York: Viking, 2014. Print.This young adult fantasy novel tells the story of sixteen-year-old Nathan. Nathan lives in modern England, which is caught in the middle of two warring factions of witches. These witches live undetected amongst humans. The White Witches paint themselves as good and orderly, while Black Witches are known as murderous and violent. At the time of Nathan’s story, the White Witches control much of England, and hunt renegade Black Witches.Nathan is unique, as he is the son of both a White Witch, and a Black Witch. In fact, Nathan is the son of the most terrifying Black Witch alive, Marcus, who eats the hearts of other witches to absorb their powers. Nathan is raised by his grandmother, with his half-siblings Jessica, Arran, and Deborah. He has never met his father. In spite of this, Nathan exhibits tendencies associated with dark witches. He cannot sleep indoors at night, and his strength changes with the moon. The White Witches’ Council constantly watches Nathan, and tries to control him through “assessments” and restrictions on whom he can speak to, and where he can go. Although his grandmother frequently reminds him that he is half-White too, Nathan also experiences abuse from his older sister, and bullying at school. Nathan becomes lonely and angry, although he finds comfort in the young White Witch Annalise, and the kindness of his brother Arran.As Nathan nears his seventeenth birthday, when all witches come into their power through a specialized ritual, the Council takes more drastic actions to control Nathan. He is removed from his family, imprisoned, and subjected to harsh and painful training. The Council hopes to use Nathan as a weapon against his father. Nathan must escape, and find a way to come into his magic by his birthday, or he will die. But, even if Nathan makes it out, he cannot tell who to trust, or how to keep those he loves from danger.Half-Bad presents a complex story with compelling characters, including a well-rounded LGBTQ character who plays an important role. The book starts out slow, using both in media res and a second person viewpoint, which may deter some readers. But, the story quickly builds and switches to a first person viewpoint. The events are strongly enhanced by engrossing descriptions of the British countryside, London, and Switzerland. Easy answers are not provided to readers. No character, including the protagonist, is completely good or bad. Instead, people are shaped by how they are labelled or represented to others, and the actions they take. Some themes may be intense for younger audiences, including descriptions of violence, abuse, death, murder, suicide, torture, and the classification and branding of people. The main character also occasionally uses swear words. Other important themes include: good vs. evil, nature vs. nurture, government control, freedom, forbidden romance, father-son relationships, and anger. It is the first of a trilogy.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Colette LeungColette Leung is a graduate student at the University of Alberta, working in the fields of Library and Information science and Humanities Computing who loves reading, cats, and tea. Her research interests focus around how digital tools can be used to explore fields such as literature, language, and history in new and innovative ways.

Changing Generational Values and New Masculinities Amongst Smallholder Export Cash Crop Producers in Papua New Guinea

This article is concerned with changing generational values and aspirations and intergenerational conflicts among migrant farmers in West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. Drawing on fieldwork amongst oil palm smallholders, the paper begins by documenting how economic pressures and a conjunction of social changes are leading younger men to challenge indigenous relations of authority and obligation that underpin father-son relationships. Rising material aspirations and revised social and economic values structured by kinship are driving this challenge by young men and making it more difficult for fathers to draw on their sons’ ‘unpaid’ labour. We then describe how these challenges are enacted through demands on fathers for new relations of production that give sons more power and control over the management of the oil palm block and the distribution of the income. These demands by an aspiring generation of young men are often contested fiercely by fathers who see such demands as weakening their authority and eroding their socio-political role in daily decision-making. We illustrate how the contemporary and highly commodified environment of migrant lives has redefined father-son relationships and forms of sociality, and contributed to intergenerational conflicts and the adoption by sons of new male identities and masculinities.

The Ghostwriter Writes No More

This narrative articulates the advantages of long-term autoethnographic logotherapy. I explore how the practice of long-term autoethnographic logotherapy led me to the point where I was prepared for my father’s death, and how that allowed me to let him go before he actually died. I propose that long-term personal narrative and autoethnographic writing are not merely a form of therapy and healing. Rather, it is a practice aligned with existential psychologist Victor Frankl’s conception of logotherapy, literally “healing through meaning.” Using vignettes, I interrogate canonical narratives about father–son relationships, especially focusing on troubled relationships, and examine standard notions of bereavement.

Media memories on the move: exploring an autoethnographic heritage of automobility and travel

ABSTRACTJourneys by car in long-ago childhoods may resonate more powerfully as time transforms them from vivid memories into a personal heritage of tourism automobility. Such experiences can also be frequently mediated by exposure to and engagement with toys, books and television shows depicting multiple travel and tourism mobilities. Advertising images in print media as well as automotive brochures and monographs offer the promise of glamorous other lives filled with the latest cars in distant international settings of privilege and elegance. This discussion utilises autoethnography to map an inspirational father–son relationship, interrogate media impacts that have influenced and shaped a lifelong automotive obsession, and explore locations that became targeted (tourist) destinations in a pre-teen, pre-international travel imagination. Needless to say, this personal heritage of automobility and travel still has a ticket to ride.

Male Adolescents’ Lived Experiences of Father-Son Relationships

Male Adolescents’ Lived Experiences of Father-Son Relationships

Ontario Boys: Masculinity and the Idea of Boyhood in Postwar Ontario, 1945–1960 by Christopher J. Greig

Ontario Boys: Masculinity and the Idea of Boyhood in Postwar Ontario, 1945-1960, by Christopher J. Greig. Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014. 220 pp. $39.99 Cdn (paper). Recently, more scholarly attention has been paid to the significance of as an important category of historical analysis. Once treated as a sub-sect of broader categorizations, is now the focus of a number of key works helping to broaden our understanding of childhood throughout Canadian history. Christopher J. Greig's recent book, Ontario Boys: Masculinity and the Idea of Boyhood in Postivar Ontario. 1945-1960, contributes to this burgeoning historiography on Canadian children. Greig examines the immediate postwar years, which he dubs a age because of its focus on children as Canada's best hope for the future (ix). Due to the upheavals caused by the Great Depression and World War II, these events prompted a re-examination of the importance of proper physical and psychological development during boyhood (defined as ages six to fourteen). As postwar Ontario struggled with the sense that traditional, heteronormative ideas about masculinity were at risk, a host of childhood experts emerged, claiming that institutions charged with shaping boys' development, mainly home, church, and school, had failed to stem the so-called crisis in masculinity. Fatherlessness during World War II, and the influence of overbearing mothers, was producing a generation of sissies (19). Fears about the future were projected onto male children, resulting in, as Greig shows, a host of new definitions of boyhood, constructed in an effort to reinstate masculine ideals and patriarchal norms. The book is organized into five thematic chapters, the first examining stable homes as key sites for the raising of proper boys. Class played a significant role here, with well-adjusted allegedly coming from comfortable, middle-class families, while poorer, working-class neighbourhoods produced troublesome boys. Greig acknowledges the changing role of the postwar father and pressures to develop a unique father-son relationship that was kind yet authoritative. Though central to boyhood, overprotective female figures like mothers and teachers were criticized for hindering masculine development and contributing to the social feminization of boys (10). Greig neglects to mention here, though, how much other female figures, like sisters and classmates, also shaped boyhood. Chapter two discusses how male-bonding was intrinsic to narratives of survival in the postwar era. Male collectives, like sports teams and clubs, were thought to act as training grounds for masculine behaviours. In popular discourse, sport, and hockey especially, were deemed natural vocations for because they taught character-building traits like strength and competitiveness. If, through boyhood fraternizing, ideal masculine characteristics could be achieved, would go on to become the leaders of the corporate world. …

‘They say he is a man now’: a tale of fathers and sons

Similarly to other minimalist societies lacking formalised social structures and offices, emotions play a central role in sustaining, expressing and evaluating relationships among the Calon Gypsies of Bahia. An analysis of emotions therefore has to take into account Calon views of personal transformation and how people’s interactions, as well as their views of themselves and situations, are patterned and described through emotions. The article is centred on three episodes that focus on the father-son relationship and are marked by strong affective ties. Love, fear and anger for one’s father or son, and a memory of care and sharing, are set against a world that is perceived as hostile and underpin the Calon institution of revenge. This article describes how, through the performance of culturally intelligible forms of violence, actors in specific social positions manipulate and create social order. As this order is unambiguously gendered, the article explores the making of a gendered, specifically masculine subjectivity: how through an affective relationship with others, one becomes and remains a man (homem).

Legacies and Memorializations in the Intergenerational Transmission of Psychic Life: Psychoanalytic Notes on Some of the Ways in Which Sons Assume Their Father's Mantle.

The intergenerational transmission of psychic life has been difficult to explore psychoanalytically given that a treatment of both parent and child is rarely, if ever, feasible. Here the issue is explored in terms of father-son relationships. Three legendary fathers (Abraham, Laius, Shiva) are discussed as illustrating the filicidal legacy they imposed psychically and corporeally on their sons. Three contemporary case vignettes are then presented, indicating ways in which sons ambivalently memorialize their fathers. This material provides a model as to some of the ways in which sons assume the mantle of the father's conscious and unconscious dynamics in the course of their personal history. Paternal legacies generate "memorializations" that express profound and poignant conflicts animating the son's psychic life. In the context of this investigation, the significance of the distinction between actual fathers or father figures (who are mortal, who possess some sort of gendered qualities, and who may be present or absent, emotionally and physically) and the "symbolic father" (who is the locus of the phallus that organizes the possibility of representational discourse) is discussed. It is suggested that boys and men typically develop in terms of confusions around this distinction. The oedipal conundrum and challenge of the boy's passage into manhood is then formulated as follows: Masculinity involves both the integration of patricidal desire (in response to the paternal legacy) and the mourning of actual fathers or father figures. It also involves the acceptance of the human condition, which is both that of mortality and of our "castratedness" in relation to the "symbolic father" as the locus of the phallus (the only one who knows whereof "He" speaks and acts, and who can neither be mourned nor surpassed).

Building model trains and planes: An autoethnographic investigation of a human occupation

ABSTRACTThis research utilised an autoethnographic method, termed collective autobiography, to explore the nature and meaning of the amateur hobby of building models from childhood to adulthood. Hobbies and leisure activities are areas of human occupation of increasing interest to a variety of disciplines. Although model making may concern the miniature representation of any subject, this paper focuses on the construction of model aircraft kits, trains and their layouts. As a complex, specific human occupation, modelling is found to contribute to personal well-being and, while the occupation may start in childhood, its associated motivations and required skills develop over a life time. The findings also reveal aspects of the nature of the relationship between the modeller, the process of modelling, and the final product. In addition elements of the gendered nature of modelling, its role within father-son relationships, and the accommodation of modelling within shared domestic spaces are brought to light. The modeller is seen to be a creative individual and a consumer. The specific modelling occupations described are recognised as having their origins within the culture of post-war baby boomer Britain, and the socioeconomic and technological environment of that period.

Soar by Joan Bauer (review)

Reviewed by: Soar by Joan Bauer Elizabeth Bush Bauer, Joan Soar. Viking, 2016 [320p] ISBN 978-0-451-47034-8 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 4-7 When Jeremiah’s mother abandoned baby Jeremiah in the workplace of computer guru Walt Lopper, she seemed to know what she was doing. Walt legally adopted the boy and has never had a moment of regret raising him over the past eleven years—even when a childhood virus left Jeremiah with cardiomyopathy and sent him into a spiral of medical interventions, including a heart transplant at ten years old. Two years later, Jeremiah’s health has improved, and his obsession with baseball (enthusiastically nurtured by Walt) hasn’t faltered. When Walt gets a consulting job in Ohio, the pair moves to a town that just happens to be as baseball crazy as they are. Jeremiah’s a tad nerdy but fairly self-confident, and he not only cultivates a friendship with a neighbor girl but wrangles a sort-of coaching position with the middle school team. This gives him a front-row seat when a local scandal erupts around the death of a star high school pitcher and the coach who gave his players performance-enhancing drugs. Despite the ailing-adolescent premise and the generic doping subplot, this is not the predictable baseball-as-metaphor-for-life offering it seems but rather a character study in resilience and a tender evocation of a father-son relationship. “Tender,” however, is not code for “slow” or “dull”; Jeremiah is a wry and witty narrator, and his take-charge (but sensible) approach to life impels the story along at a brisk clip. Bauer’s offerings have tended to feature female protagonists, and it’s gratifying to see what she can do with a “guy book.” Copyright © 2016 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Humanity and Paternal Eros: The Father-Son Relationship in Comparative Perspective

This paper examines the human relational patterns presented in the philosophical writings of the Confucian thinker Dai Zhen (戴震1724–77) and the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s (1906–95) Totality and Infinity to uncover the ethical significance of the father-son relationship. I argue that for both thinkers the father-son relation is not just one type of human relationship among other social dyads, but rather, of greater significance, serves as the paradigmatic model of the ethical human relationship in bringing to light the idea of the ethical self as a responsible being in relation to others.

“You Might Want to Call Your Father”: An Autoethnographic Account of Masculinity, Relationships, and My Father

ABSTRACTAutoethnographic scholarship interrogating father–son relationships and masculinity adds to our understanding of father–son relationships through the critique of dominant models of fathering that may harm intimacy. This autoethnography explores one turning point that occurred between the author and his father when they experienced the death of a mutual friend. This event became the catalyst in the relationship, which the author illustrates through narrative vignettes to show the struggles that exist, and highlights a view on father–son relationships and masculinities that challenges masculine norms in order to (re)create a valued relationship. The goal of this narrative is to offer an opportunity for others to reflect on identity, relationships, and masculinities in their own experiences and relationships.