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List of contents
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
About the author
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)
