Nostalgia as [Un]Serious Emotion: Games and Toys in Everyday Narrative Practices about Childhood

This paper analyzes the contemporary context of nostalgia, recollection and narration of childhood events on the basis of field notes collected by means of different methodological techniques. The narrative quest for the past produces interpretations of past events and experiences and opens the space to the feeling of nostalgia, or nostalgic stories. This paper aims to present a small portion of the captured everyday life in which games and toys appear as any other subobject or pseudoobject of nostalgia, but with a distance from one’s own childhood experience. We utilize Donald Braid’s approach which opens the space for observing the transmission of oral personal narratives and the transmission of emotions in and through language.