{"product_id":"the-small-worlds-of-childhood-philosophy-poetics-and-the-queer-temporalities-of-early-life-paperback","title":"The Small Worlds of Childhood: Philosophy, Poetics, and the Queer Temporalities of Early Life - Paperback","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cp style=\"text-align: right;\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/reportcopyrightinfringement.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eReport copyright infringement\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003cp\u003eby \u003cb\u003eLauren Shizuko Stone\u003c\/b\u003e (Author)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Small Worlds of Childhood \u003c\/i\u003eargues 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eStone 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 \u003ci\u003eliterary\u003c\/i\u003e language in the service of a variety of \u003ci\u003ephilosophical\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eBy 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eThis title is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003ch3\u003eBack Jacket\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Bound up as they may be in fantasies of normative futurity, children in \u003ci\u003eThe Small Worlds of Childhood\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\"--\u003cb\u003eCatriona MacLeod\u003c\/b\u003e, University of Chicago \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"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.\"--\u003cb\u003eAdrian Daub\u003c\/b\u003e, Stanford University \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Small Worlds of Childhood \u003c\/i\u003eargues 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eStone 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 \u003ci\u003eliterary\u003c\/i\u003e language in the service of a variety of \u003ci\u003ephilosophical\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eBy 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eLauren Shizuko Stone \u003c\/b\u003eis Assistant Professor of German at the University of Colorado at Boulder.\u003ch3\u003eAuthor Biography\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eLauren Shizuko Stone\u003c\/b\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eFlirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction\u003c\/i\u003e (Fordham, 2015)\u003c\/p\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eNumber of Pages:\u003c\/strong\u003e 224\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eDimensions:\u003c\/strong\u003e 0.54 x 9 x 6 IN\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003ePublication Date:\u003c\/strong\u003e May 06, 2025\u003c\/div\u003e\n            ","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45527225532518,"sku":"9781531510510","price":69.24,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0599\/7255\/0758\/files\/9e33wCk1tK9781531510510.webp?v=1776646236","url":"https:\/\/infinitylightwa.com\/products\/the-small-worlds-of-childhood-philosophy-poetics-and-the-queer-temporalities-of-early-life-paperback","provider":"Infinity Light","version":"1.0","type":"link"}