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On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
Miniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb weddings, tall tales, and objects of tourism and this diverse group of cultural forms is the subject of On Longing , a fascinating analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated to animate or realize certain versions of the world. Originally published in 1984 (Johns Hopkins University Press), and now available in paperback for the first time, this highly original book draws on insights from semiotics and from psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist criticism. Addressing the relations of language to experience, the body to scale, and narratives to objects, Susan Stewart looks at the "miniature" as a metaphor for interiority and at the "gigantic" as an exaggeration of aspects of the exterior. In the final part of her essay Stewart examines the ways in which the "souvenir" and the "collection" are objects mediating experience in time and space.
232 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1984
84 people are currently reading
2082 people want to read
About the author
Susan Stewart
90 books69 followersSusan Stewart (born 1952) is an American poet, university professor and literary critic.
Professor Stewart holds degrees from Dickinson College (B.A. in English and Anthropology), the Johns Hopkins University (M.F.A. in Poetics) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Folklore). She teaches the history of poetry, aesthetics, and the philosophy of literature, most recently at Princeton University.
Her poems have appeared in many journals including: The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Harper's, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and Beloit Poetry Journal.
In the late 2000s she collaborated with composer James Primosch on a song cycle commissioned by the Chicago Symphony that premiered in the fall of 2009. She has served on the judging panel of the Wallace Stevens Award on six occasions.
In 2005 Professor Stewart was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
About her work, the poet and critic Allen Grossman has written, "Stewart has built a poetic syntax capable of conveying an utterly singular account of consciousness, by the light of which it is possible to see the structure of the human world with a new clarity and an unforeseen precision, possible only in her presence and by means of her art."
(from Wikipedia)
Professor Stewart holds degrees from Dickinson College (B.A. in English and Anthropology), the Johns Hopkins University (M.F.A. in Poetics) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Folklore). She teaches the history of poetry, aesthetics, and the philosophy of literature, most recently at Princeton University.
Her poems have appeared in many journals including: The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Harper's, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and Beloit Poetry Journal.
In the late 2000s she collaborated with composer James Primosch on a song cycle commissioned by the Chicago Symphony that premiered in the fall of 2009. She has served on the judging panel of the Wallace Stevens Award on six occasions.
In 2005 Professor Stewart was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
About her work, the poet and critic Allen Grossman has written, "Stewart has built a poetic syntax capable of conveying an utterly singular account of consciousness, by the light of which it is possible to see the structure of the human world with a new clarity and an unforeseen precision, possible only in her presence and by means of her art."
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 57 reviews
Want to read
February 20, 2010have look at small sections of this book for multiple papers and every time i am more frustrated that i dont have the time to just sit down and read it all through. pretty much a tying together of everything i am interested in.
dear susan stewart,
let's hang out
love, kate
dear susan stewart,
let's hang out
love, kate
June 11, 2008
stewart thinks nostalgia is a dirty, dirty std. It is also the desire for an impossible return to some kind of ‘authentic’ moment in the past, one that cripples you from experiencing the immediacy of the present.
the sign is in crisis! and in todays postmodern exchange economy, your overly mediated and abstracted life can no longer experience the present unless it is grounded in the objects of some idealized/allusive past – that means your personal or ‘unique’ experiences do not give meaning to these objects, their object-ness give meaning to YOU.
derrida, lacan and baudrillard were all invited to this party. know what else? stewart is a brilliant writer and I love her.
the sign is in crisis! and in todays postmodern exchange economy, your overly mediated and abstracted life can no longer experience the present unless it is grounded in the objects of some idealized/allusive past – that means your personal or ‘unique’ experiences do not give meaning to these objects, their object-ness give meaning to YOU.
derrida, lacan and baudrillard were all invited to this party. know what else? stewart is a brilliant writer and I love her.
February 24, 2008
A one-of-a-kind book. Stewart's is the kind of scholarship that bursts out of its ivory box; it's much too robust and original and genuinely, genuinely brilliant to concern itself with the empty rhetoric and discursive obscurity of much "theory"-based criticism. You could read her work for the prose alone and be enthralled. See also "Crimes of Writing," which is magnificent. Susan Stewart is that rare commodity in her discipline: a real writer.
April 26, 2010
While this book is a quintessential example of "high theory" in that it tends toward abstraction and makes grand gestures toward relating everything in the world to everything else, the dichotomies is creates (between miniature and gigantic and souvenir and collection most notably) are incredibly useful. Further, while Stewart is intent on using these dichotomies to explicate on the grand schemes of the world, they can be easily applied to the smaller world of the book collectors I'm studying. In particular, I think her conclusions will go a long way toward helping me to distinguish (and compare) the book as a collectible object and the book as a consumable object. Ironically, her definition of collection relies on consumption (and the substitution of aesthetic value for use value), whereas her suggestion of souvenirs comes closer to the classic idea of collection found in other studies on the subject. In both cases, however, the material object stands in for a larger relationship between the collector and the world. I would have liked to see more discussion of the specific materiality of objects (she does discuss material books in relationship to the words they contain in the monograph's early parts, but this falls away in favor of her later suggestion that the contents of collections matter less than the particular relationship toward organization and categorization they enable). Nonetheless, this is a thoroughly realized theory and one with both practical and theoretical applications that will work well for my attempts to theorize the book as object.
December 27, 2025
read this for my aesthetics of scale class which might be my favorite class i've ever taken in college! genuinely that class changed my life a little bit (not to exaggerate or anything but fr) this book was super helpful for writing both my papers about the miniature but don't ask me to explain a tom thumb wedding cause i did not understand that section one bit
April 5, 2023
A promising title but the main body is inhibited by dialectical issues. A more vigorous epistemological critique is needed prior to embarking on weighty topics such as the subject, the self and nature, or, what she may refer to as the inner and outer spheres. Stewart argues that the miniature is a metaphor for the interior space and time of the bourgeois subject… but before reaching this point, surely one must ask, what is time, space and the subject, and to her? The statement isn’t wrong per se; in fact, it is highly intriguing, yet the argument would be more convincing with clearer ontological and epistemological engagements. Non-representational theory would be useful here.
Perhaps I am being harsh but I couldn’t find a whole, complete argument grounding the work. There were numerous references to other artists, philosophers and poets but sadly this did not function like scaffolding to hold the work together and make it stronger, it really just loosened and scattered the key point(s). At times I felt like I was wandering around in the dark.
Perhaps I am being harsh but I couldn’t find a whole, complete argument grounding the work. There were numerous references to other artists, philosophers and poets but sadly this did not function like scaffolding to hold the work together and make it stronger, it really just loosened and scattered the key point(s). At times I felt like I was wandering around in the dark.
April 1, 2008
I had high hopes for this book, but I felt it didn't reach sympathetically at its object nor shed much light on these obsessions. Does liking miniatures make you a smaller person as I fear Stewart suggests? Or does it invite imagination around objects that would be overly decadent if achieved in their life-sized form? Miniatures permit a sort of "having" without owning that in many cases must be viewed as less materialistic than owning the objects in life-size. Distortion of scale is an aesthetic quality not necessarily bound inextricably to kitsch or pop culture. And even if it were...I'm concerned about the tone here.
May 17, 2011
Brilliant, despite a brutally dense first chapter. A clever, syncretic, wide-ranging study of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir and the collection, and their roles in psychology and culture. Anyone studying the co-construction of the self can benefit from this, especially those focused on cultures whose identity derives in part from divergence from a social norm. A real tour de force of creative synthesis, and, after that first chapter, an excellent read.
September 25, 2019
This can only be described as academic glossolalia.
September 24, 2025
will be returning to this
"the nostalgic is enamored of distance, not the referent itself. Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss"
"the nostalgic is enamored of distance, not the referent itself. Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss"
Read
August 29, 2025"Nostalgia is the desire for desire... narrative utopia that works only by virtue of its partiality" (23)
"Nostalgia is the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition, and denies the repetition's capacity to form identity" (23)
"Through the freak we derive an image of the normal; to know an age's typical freaks is, in fact, to know its points of standardization" (133)
"The possession of the metonymic object is a kind of dispossession in that the presence of the object all the more radically speaks to its status as a mere substitution and to its subsequent distance from the self. This distance is not simply experienced as a loss; it is also experienced as a surplus of signification. It is experienced, as is the loss of the dual relation with the mother, as catastrophe and jouissance simultaneously" (135)
"In the subject's desire to experience mortality is issued the simultaneous desire to belie the content of that mortality and hence transcend it: to produce a representation with no referent-- each sign as a postcard from the land of the dead, and on the other side, the longing mark that is the proper name" (173)
"Nostalgia is the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition, and denies the repetition's capacity to form identity" (23)
"Through the freak we derive an image of the normal; to know an age's typical freaks is, in fact, to know its points of standardization" (133)
"The possession of the metonymic object is a kind of dispossession in that the presence of the object all the more radically speaks to its status as a mere substitution and to its subsequent distance from the self. This distance is not simply experienced as a loss; it is also experienced as a surplus of signification. It is experienced, as is the loss of the dual relation with the mother, as catastrophe and jouissance simultaneously" (135)
"In the subject's desire to experience mortality is issued the simultaneous desire to belie the content of that mortality and hence transcend it: to produce a representation with no referent-- each sign as a postcard from the land of the dead, and on the other side, the longing mark that is the proper name" (173)
October 6, 2018
"The miniature is considered in this essay as a metaphor for the interior space and time of the bourgeois subject. Analogously, the gigantic is considered as a metaphor for the abstract authority of the state and the collective, public life. In examining the narratives of the miniature and the gigantic, I attempt to outline the ways in which these discourses of the self and the world mutually define and delimit one another.”
January 19, 2019
I will admit in a moment that I made it through the opening chapter of this book only because I love Stewart's poems so much. I found that as she set up her theoretical framework, she used that language that graduate students in English were so fond of in the late 80s and early 90s. I found myself actually smiling at some of it, and glad that we have moved on to a different kind of discourse.
But once I got through that, I got to the good stuff -- the actual discussion of those differences between miniature/gigantic and, for me the most helpful distinction, between souvenir/collection. Much of Stewart's argument is shaped by Benjamin's sense of the authentic -- even the aura -- although she doesn't use his language as much as Baudrillard's. And, of course, much is this is shaped by the classic sense of "the creation of desire." She is very convincing that the narratives of these categories happen at the margin -- in the childish, the feminine, the mad.
But once I got through that, I got to the good stuff -- the actual discussion of those differences between miniature/gigantic and, for me the most helpful distinction, between souvenir/collection. Much of Stewart's argument is shaped by Benjamin's sense of the authentic -- even the aura -- although she doesn't use his language as much as Baudrillard's. And, of course, much is this is shaped by the classic sense of "the creation of desire." She is very convincing that the narratives of these categories happen at the margin -- in the childish, the feminine, the mad.
October 24, 2007
objects have a life of their own, both in the world and in our imaginations, and this book accounts for how we arrange ourselves and our objects into collections, how we fantasize about who we are in the world in relation to objects that are giant or miniature, and for how we try to reimagine ourselves by rearranging the objects around us.
this book also contains one of the most piercing thoughts on writing and death i've ever read:
". . . while speech gains authenticity, writing promises immortality, or at least the immortality of the material world in contrast to the mortality of the body. our terror of the unmarked grave is a terror of the insignificance of a world without writing." (on longing, p. 31)
this book also contains one of the most piercing thoughts on writing and death i've ever read:
". . . while speech gains authenticity, writing promises immortality, or at least the immortality of the material world in contrast to the mortality of the body. our terror of the unmarked grave is a terror of the insignificance of a world without writing." (on longing, p. 31)
November 23, 2025
great book if you want to understand why you have a raging need to collect Smiskis and other items of varying sizes
September 4, 2012
A dense read centered on metaphors and the relation of narratives to its objects. A fascinating analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated to animate certain versions of the wrold. Stewart addresses the relations of the body to scale, and narratives to objects. She examines the ways the sourvenir and the collection are objects of experiece in space and time.
December 20, 2014
Extremely thought provoking - a good read :)
December 22, 2017
Susan Stewart's book has some very interesting insights to offer on our relationship with things, and the language surrounding those things. Her approach, therefore, partakes of both phenomenology and semiotics. I was most taken with her discussion of souvenirs, and how they relate to memory and experience, and how they vary from collections (as in museums). While she discussing some charming subjects (like dollhouses), this book is far from an "easy read."
January 28, 2019
A rare gem.
A poetic and well-researched piece of contemporary criticism addressing narrative, experience, and scale in most unexpected, but yet very human way.
(Not an easy read and I understood about 7% percent of it, but the invention of the subject by Susan Stewart is both fascinating and inspiring - it proves that not everything has been researched yet, even if it's been in front of our noses for ages).
A poetic and well-researched piece of contemporary criticism addressing narrative, experience, and scale in most unexpected, but yet very human way.
(Not an easy read and I understood about 7% percent of it, but the invention of the subject by Susan Stewart is both fascinating and inspiring - it proves that not everything has been researched yet, even if it's been in front of our noses for ages).
August 27, 2025
Took me forever to read a single page. So confusing. Really have to concentrate to understand a couple sentences in a page. The little I did understand was fairly insightful, but the rest just seemed a bit too much of a stretch
January 7, 2026
The opening is dense but stick it out! The rest of the book is much more readable and grounded in fascinating examples. Very applicable to today’s world of zero attention spans, where we must rely on a shorthand to express who we are to one another.
Want to read
January 5, 2016"These conventions of description are intimately bound up with the conception of time as it is both portrayed in the work and partaken of by the work. By means of its conventions of depiction, temporality, and, ultimately, closure, narrative here seeks to 'realize' a certain formulation of the world. Hence we can see the many narratives that dream of the inanimate–made–animate as symptomatic of all narrative's desire to invent a realizable world, a world which 'works.' In this sense, every narrative is a miniature and every book a microcosm, for such forms always seek to finalize, bring closure to, a totality or model" (Stewart, pgs. xi–xii).
"For the miniature, in its exaggeration of interiority and its relation to the space and time of the individual perceiving subject, threatens the infinity of description without hierarchization, a world whose anteriority is always absolute, and whose profound interiority is therefore always unrecoverable. Hence for us the miniature appears as a metaphor for all books and all bodies" (Stewart, pg. #44).
"The description here is not only directed toward the visual—it evokes the sensual as well, the hand being the measure of the miniature. The miniature has the capacity to make its context remarkable; its fantastic qualities are related to what lies outside it in such a way as to transform the total context. […] Amid such transformations of scale, the exaggeration of the miniature must continually assert a principle of balance and equivalence, or the narrative will become grotesque. […] The model here is nature and her harmony of detail. The space is managed by simile and by the principles of equivalence existing between the body and nature. Scale is established by means of a set of correspondences to the familiar. And time is managed by means of a miniaturization of its significance; the miniature is the notation of the moment and the moment's consequences" (Stewart, pg. #46).
"The miniature offers a world clearly limited in space but frozen and thereby both particularized and generalized in time—particularized in that the miniature concentrates upon the single instance and not upon the abstract rule, but generalized in that that instance comes to transcend, to stand for, a spectrum of other instances" (Stewart, pg. #48).
"There are no miniatures in nature; the miniature is a cultural product, the product of an eye performing certain operations, manipulating, and attending in certain ways to, the physical world. […] The miniature assumes an anthropocentric universe for its absolute sense of scale" (Stewart, pgs. #55–56).
"Today in America the uses of miniaturized landscapes continue to emphasize this sporting, or play, function. […] The image that is produced not only bears the tangible qualities of material reality but also serves as a representation, an image, of a reality which does not exist. The referent here is most often the fantastic, yet the fantastic is in fact given 'life' by its miniaturization. Although we cannot miniaturize what has not had material being in the first place, we can align the fantastic to the real and thereby miniaturize it by displacement. […] In these fantastic landscapes, the transformation of the miniature is effected by magic, not by labor" (Stewart, pg. #60).
"For the function of the miniature here is to bring historical events 'to life,' to immediacy, and thereby to erase their history, to lose us within their presentness. The transcendence presented by the miniature is a spatial transcendence, a transcendence which erases the productive possibilities of understanding through time. Its locus is thereby the nostalgic. The miniature here erases not only labor but causality and effect. Understanding is sacrificed to being in context" (Stewart, pg. #60).
"Today we find the miniature located at a place of origin (the childhood of the self, or even the advertising scheme whereby a miniature of the company’s first plant or a miniature of a company’s earliest product is put on display in a window or lobby) and at a place of ending (the productions of the hobbyist: knickknacks of the domestic collected by elderly women, or the model trains built by the retired engineer); and both locations are viewed from a transcendent position, a position which is always within the standpoint of present lived reality and which thereby always nostalgically distances its object" (Stewart, pgs. #68–69).
"The paradoxes of this problem of the proliferation of images are most clearly articulated in pop art, which has taken its place within the abstract space of mass culture and the mass spectacle at the same time that it has usurped the space of public sculpture. The Oldenburgs that dot the urban landscapes of Chicago and Philadelphia are the legendary giants, the topographical mascots, of those cities. They are relatives of other forms of the architecture–of–the–above, particularly the billboard and the neon sign, those forms which are all façade. And they are representations of mechanical reproduction arrested into authenticity by being ‘original objects’” (Stewart, pg. #92).
"For the miniature, in its exaggeration of interiority and its relation to the space and time of the individual perceiving subject, threatens the infinity of description without hierarchization, a world whose anteriority is always absolute, and whose profound interiority is therefore always unrecoverable. Hence for us the miniature appears as a metaphor for all books and all bodies" (Stewart, pg. #44).
"The description here is not only directed toward the visual—it evokes the sensual as well, the hand being the measure of the miniature. The miniature has the capacity to make its context remarkable; its fantastic qualities are related to what lies outside it in such a way as to transform the total context. […] Amid such transformations of scale, the exaggeration of the miniature must continually assert a principle of balance and equivalence, or the narrative will become grotesque. […] The model here is nature and her harmony of detail. The space is managed by simile and by the principles of equivalence existing between the body and nature. Scale is established by means of a set of correspondences to the familiar. And time is managed by means of a miniaturization of its significance; the miniature is the notation of the moment and the moment's consequences" (Stewart, pg. #46).
"The miniature offers a world clearly limited in space but frozen and thereby both particularized and generalized in time—particularized in that the miniature concentrates upon the single instance and not upon the abstract rule, but generalized in that that instance comes to transcend, to stand for, a spectrum of other instances" (Stewart, pg. #48).
"There are no miniatures in nature; the miniature is a cultural product, the product of an eye performing certain operations, manipulating, and attending in certain ways to, the physical world. […] The miniature assumes an anthropocentric universe for its absolute sense of scale" (Stewart, pgs. #55–56).
"Today in America the uses of miniaturized landscapes continue to emphasize this sporting, or play, function. […] The image that is produced not only bears the tangible qualities of material reality but also serves as a representation, an image, of a reality which does not exist. The referent here is most often the fantastic, yet the fantastic is in fact given 'life' by its miniaturization. Although we cannot miniaturize what has not had material being in the first place, we can align the fantastic to the real and thereby miniaturize it by displacement. […] In these fantastic landscapes, the transformation of the miniature is effected by magic, not by labor" (Stewart, pg. #60).
"For the function of the miniature here is to bring historical events 'to life,' to immediacy, and thereby to erase their history, to lose us within their presentness. The transcendence presented by the miniature is a spatial transcendence, a transcendence which erases the productive possibilities of understanding through time. Its locus is thereby the nostalgic. The miniature here erases not only labor but causality and effect. Understanding is sacrificed to being in context" (Stewart, pg. #60).
"Today we find the miniature located at a place of origin (the childhood of the self, or even the advertising scheme whereby a miniature of the company’s first plant or a miniature of a company’s earliest product is put on display in a window or lobby) and at a place of ending (the productions of the hobbyist: knickknacks of the domestic collected by elderly women, or the model trains built by the retired engineer); and both locations are viewed from a transcendent position, a position which is always within the standpoint of present lived reality and which thereby always nostalgically distances its object" (Stewart, pgs. #68–69).
"The paradoxes of this problem of the proliferation of images are most clearly articulated in pop art, which has taken its place within the abstract space of mass culture and the mass spectacle at the same time that it has usurped the space of public sculpture. The Oldenburgs that dot the urban landscapes of Chicago and Philadelphia are the legendary giants, the topographical mascots, of those cities. They are relatives of other forms of the architecture–of–the–above, particularly the billboard and the neon sign, those forms which are all façade. And they are representations of mechanical reproduction arrested into authenticity by being ‘original objects’” (Stewart, pg. #92).
June 15, 2018
Brilliant but dense.
February 9, 2020
If this ambitious and fascinating work had been about a little less, I would have appreciated it a little more.
November 30, 2020
A jewel!
March 23, 2021
What I understood was pretty fascinating.
November 26, 2021
it took me 1.75 years to read this book and yet i honestly could not tell you what it is about. it was fine though.
March 15, 2022
A wonderful meandering narrative about how and why we engage with and collect objects
May 13, 2022
Difficult read full of compelling thoughts.
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December 30, 2022I’m reading this in a way that’s much more focused than skimming but I couldn’t consider what I’m doing to be thorough. Taking what I need for reference for my work and moving through.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 57 reviews