The Small Worlds of Childhood
Philosophy, Poetics, and the Queer Temporalities of Early Life
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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.
Bound up as they may be in fantasies of normative futurity, children in The Small Worlds of Childhood are neither innocents nor pre-adults. Lauren Stone’s elegantly written book encourages us to tarry with the time and small spaces of childhood in texts by Adalbert Stifter, Rilke, Benjamin, and Freud, and in doing so it suggestively presents an alternative temporality to the nostalgia of the Romantic view of childhood, or the essential futurity of the ubiquitous Bildungsroman tradition.—Catriona MacLeod, University of Chicago
Lauren Shizuko Stone’s book is a theoretically far-ranging, deeply grounded and always stimulating study of the changing world of literary childhood. She traces with great alacrity what poetics did with children and their gaze, and what this focus did to literature.—Adrian Daub, Stanford University
Introduction: Small Worlds, Local Theories | 1
“A joyful, shining festive thing,” 4
Childhood’s Long History as the Not-Yet of Adulthood, 10
Reading for Childhood’s Good Surprises, 14
Queer Experiments in Childhood Storytelling, 16
1 Adalbert Stifter’s Topographical Worlds of Childhood | 23
Children’s Forts, Not Grown-Up Arbors, 23
Indian Summer: Childhood’s Time Is Out of Order, 28
“Tourmaline” and Childhood’s “Bad Timing,” 38
“Limestone” and the Cartographic View of Childhood, 45
Stifter’s Revolving Worlds of Childhood, 55
2 Rainer Maria Rilke’s Lifeworlds of Childhood | 57
The View from Childhood, 57
“Seeing more; not more than seeing”: What Children See in “Pierre Dumont,” 63
Playing Dead: Childhood Reflection, 71
Toy Souls: What Children Apprehend, 75
The Fantastic World of Childhood in the “Notes” and the Notebooks, 79
“Wise incomprehension . . .”: On the Model of Being-Child, 92
3 Walter Benjamin’s Small Worlds of Childhood | 95
Children’s Play and Reflections of the World, 95
Leibniz’s Monadology and Childhood Intuition in Benjamin’s Early Essays, 102
Technologies of Representation in “Portraits of Children” and “Enlargements,” 107
“Multum in Parvo”: Aphorism, Miniaturization, and the Project of Berlin Childhood around 1900, 115
Small Worlds of Childhood: Memoir and Fragment, 121
Childhood as Metaphysical Paradigm, 132
Coda: Sigmund Freud, Childhood, and the Return of Futurity | 139
Acknowledgments | 147
Notes | 149
Works Cited | 203
Index | 217
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