The Small Worlds of Childhood argues that prose representations of bourgeois childhood contain surprising opportunities to reflect on the temporality of experience. In their narratives of children at home in their everyday worlds, Adalbert Stifter, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Walter Benjamin are not only able to shed a unique light on key issues in the history of philosophy. They also offer a queer critique of the normative expectation that the literature of childhood is oriented toward the future. Stone shows that when writers engage in philosophical storytelling, showing children tarrying in quotidian experience, they dislodge childhood from its nostalgic value to grown-ups and the heteronormative demand to grow up. Such stories of children as philosophical subjects thus take on their own lingering, backwards, or all together strange sense of time. Stone demonstrates the necessity of recognizing how texts on childhood—before and beyond Freud—engage literary language in the service of a variety of philosophical attitudes, reminding us how poetic techniques can tell us something extraordinary about moments of ordinary experience and the manner with which humans, and especially children, cognize the world. By bringing canonical German-language literary and philosophical traditions into conversation with current English-language queer approaches, Stone opens a queer counter-history of German and Austrian realist and modernist literature. This title is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.
Lauren Shizuko Stone is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is co-editor (with Daniel Hoffman Schwartz and Barbara Natalie Nagel) of Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction (Fordham, 2015)
Introduction: Small Worlds, Local Theories 1"A joyful, shining festive thing," 4Childhood's Long History as the Not-Yet of Adulthood, 10Reading for Childhood's Good Surprises, 14Queer Experiments in Childhood Storytelling, 161 Adalbert Stifter's Topographical Worlds of Childhood 23Children's Forts, Not Grown-Up Arbors, 23Indian Summer: Childhood's Time Is Out of Order, 28"Tourmaline" and Childhood's "Bad Timing," 38"Limestone" and the Cartographic View of Childhood, 45Stifter's Revolving Worlds of Childhood, 552 Rainer Maria Rilke's Lifeworlds of Childhood 57The View from Childhood, 57"Seeing more; not more than seeing": What Children See in "Pierre Dumont," 63Playing Dead: Childhood Reflection, 71Toy Souls: What Children Apprehend, 75The Fantastic World of Childhood in the "Notes" and the Notebooks, 79"Wise incomprehension . . .": On the Model of Being-Child, 923 Walter Benjamin's Small Worlds of Childhood 95Children's Play and Reflections of the World, 95Leibniz's Monadology and Childhood Intuition in Benjamin's Early Essays, 102Technologies of Representation in "Portraits of Children" and "Enlargements," 107"Multum in Parvo": Aphorism, Miniaturization, and the Project of Berlin Childhood around 1900, 115Small Worlds of Childhood: Memoir and Fragment, 121Childhood as Metaphysical Paradigm, 132Coda: Sigmund Freud, Childhood, and the Return of Futurity 139Acknowledgments 147Notes 149Works Cited 203Index 217
