Rilke's “Kinderstube”: Phenomenology in Childhood Spaces

Abstract

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.