Lauren Shizuko StoneThe Small Worlds of Childhood
Philosophy, Poetics, and the Queer Temporalities of Early Life
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
