The Small Worlds of Childhood : Philosophy, Poetics, and the Queer Temporalities of Early Life

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 variet