About

Lauren Shizuko Stone is an Associate Professor of German at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also serves as the Director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Critical Theory and is an affiliate faculty member in the LGBTQ Studies Program. Her academic work focuses on narratives of marginal figures in everyday life, exploring how literary representations intersect with philosophical domains. She teaches German, Austrian, and Swiss literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, integrating stories of ordinary life with literary theory, history of philosophy, and queer and critical theories. Her research includes a forthcoming monograph titled The Small Worlds of Childhood: Philosophy, Poetics, and the Queer Temporalities of Early Life, which argues that prose representations of bourgeois childhood offer opportunities for philosophical reflection on temporality and provide a queer critique of normative expectations about childhood literature. She has published articles on depictions of children and kinship in nineteenth-century German and Austrian literature and is a co-editor and contributor to the volume Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics this Side of Seduction. Currently, she is working on her next monograph, Feeling Queer: Affect and Ambivalence in the Long Century of Desire, which examines poetic strategies depicting queer women and their desires from the early nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, emphasizing how women’s queer sexuality and disapprobation are reflected in poetics of ambivalence.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Literature
• Social psychology
• Art
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• The “Irreducibly Doubled Stroke”: Flirtation, Felicity, and Sincerity

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Literature
  • Art
  PublisherDOI

• “Almost Nothing; Almost Everything”: An Introduction to the Discourse of Flirtation

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Epistemology
  PublisherDOI

• Flirtations

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-06-23

  bookSenior author

  What is flirtation, and how does it differ from seduction?In historical terms, the particular question of flirtation has tended to be obscured by that of seduction, which has understandably been a major preoccupation for twentieth-century thought and critical theory. Both the discourse and the critique of seduction are unified by their shared obsession with a very determinate end: power. In contrast, flirtation is the game in which no one seems to gain the upper hand and no one seems to surrender. The counter-concept of flirtation has thus stood quietly to the side, never quite achieving the same prominence as that of seduction. It is this elusive (and largely ignored) territory of playing for play’s sake that is the subject of this anthology.The essays in this volume address the under-theorized terrain of flirtation not as a subgenre of seduction but rather as a phenomenon in its own right. Drawing on the interdisciplinary history of scholarship on flirtation even as it re-approaches the question from a distinctly aesthetic and literary-theoretical point of view, the contributors to Flirtations thus give an account of the practice of flirtation and of the figure of the flirt, taking up the act’s relationship to issues of mimesis, poetic ambiguity, and aesthetic pleasure. The art of this poetic playfulness—often read or misread as flirtation’s "empty gesture"—becomes suddenly legible as the wielding of a particular and subtle form of nonteleological power

  PublisherDOI

• INTERLUDE

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• Approximate Family: The Taxonomy of Motherhood in Theodor Storm's <i>Viola Tricolor</i>

  The Germanic Review Literature Culture Theory · 2017-01-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Unlike the trope of culpa patris in Carsten Curator, Theodor Storm's representation of matrilineal heredity in Viola Tricolor does not follow the strict limits of a bloodline. This article argues that the mechanism of influence in this novella should be read as an experimental deviation from Storm's typical construction of the family as biologically or legally determined. In the denial of female reproductive sexuality in the two wives (“Mutter,” “Mama”) and the literal resemblance between stepmother and child (“Ines,” “Nesi”), Storm imagines a system of female kinship constructed as a visible field rather than as the result of an unseen natural force. Through the multiplicity of female names, Storm's taxonomic strategy relies on proximity and similitude as the basis for circumscribing maternal step-relations in Viola Tricolor. Storm thus envisions motherhood as issuing from an act of naming that, like the nested hierarchy of Linnaeus's Systema Natura, relies on visual resemblance and spatial arrangement.

  PublisherDOI

• Rilke's “Kinderstube”: Phenomenology in Childhood Spaces

  The German Quarterly · 2017-10-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The detail and care with which Rilke renders everyday objects of experience issues from his well‐documented concern for the significance of visual perception. In contrast to existing Rilke scholarship, which has largely concentrated on the motif of schauen in his poetry, this article addresses how his prose texts on childhood ( Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge and Notizen zur Melodie der Dinge ) develop a complex theory about the interaction between the child's visual experience of space and corresponding mental acts. I argue that Rilke mobilizes ambivalent imagery of the home to connect childlike misrecognition to the poetic impulse. Reconsidering more recent work on the subject, I show that Rilke, like Husserl, was indeed a phenomenologically “technical” thinker of ordinary experience, whose prose celebrates the revisionary power of the child as the poet‐subject of the domestic sphere.

  PublisherDOI

• Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge. <i>Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830.</i>

  The Germanic Review Literature Culture Theory · 2017-10-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  What should constitute a “family”? What produces and sustains such affective bonds? In Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge's monograph, Novel Affinities, she suggests that such questions already found ample ...

  PublisherDOI

• “ALMOST NOTHING; ALMOST EVERYTHING”:

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2015-05-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• INTERLUDE.

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2015-05-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction

  2015-05-01 · 1 citations

  bookSenior author

  What is flirtation, and how does it differ from seduction? In historical terms, the particular question of flirtation has tended to be obscured by that of seduction, which has understandably been a major preoccupation for twentieth-century thought and critical theory. Both the discourse and the critique of seduction are unified by their shared obsession with a very determinate end: power. In contrast, flirtation is the game in which no one seems to gain the upper hand and no one seems to surrender. The counter-concept of flirtation has thus stood quietly to the side, never quite achieving the same prominence as that of seduction. It is this elusive (and largely ignored) territory of playing for play’s sake that is the subject of this anthology. The essays in this volume address the under-theorized terrain of flirtation not as a subgenre of seduction but rather as a phenomenon in its own right. Drawing on the interdisciplinary history of scholarship on flirtation even as it re-approaches the question from a distinctly aesthetic and literary-theoretical point of view, the contributors to Flirtations thus give an account of the practice of flirtation and of the figure of the flirt, taking up the act’s relationship to issues of mimesis, poetic ambiguity, and aesthetic pleasure. The art of this poetic playfulness―often read or misread as flirtation’s “empty gesture”―becomes suddenly legible as the wielding of a particular and subtle form of nonteleological power. (Amazon.com)

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Barbara Natalie Nagel

  5 shared

• Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz

  4 shared

Labs

• Germanic & Slavic Languages & LiteraturesPI