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This chapter develops the preceding one's account of autobiographical writing which swerves into fiction. It explores the hybrid form identified in Stephen Reynolds's 1906 essay ‘Autobiografiction.’ Reynolds's arguments are examined in detail. The significance of the body of work he identifies, fusing spiritual experience, fictional narrative, and the essay, is discussed in relation to a growing resistance to conventional forms of auto/biography. One of Reynolds's chief examples is A. C. Benson. Two of his works — The House of Quiet and The Thread of Gold — are analysed in detail, with particular attention to his elaborate play with the forms of life‐writing, and with pseudonymity and posthumousness. Benson's approach to the spiritual through autobiografiction is contextualized in terms of secularization, psychical research, and the emergence of psycho‐analysis. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the trope (deriving from the Nietzsche–Wilde/subjectivist views outlined at the start) that fiction is the best autobiography; and by considering the light the concept of autobiografiction can shed on modernism.

Hawks speaks his admiration for John Ford and his work and talks about their friendship. He discusses the similarities and differences in their directing styles, and recounts their last visit before Ford’s death.

This chapter discusses Kierkegaard's perspectives on his own childhood. It first describes a document authored by Kierkegaard which contains a review of the first twenty-six years of his life, though that document has since been lost to history. The chapter then embarks on a more general discussion of Kierkegaard's early years; including his childhood habits, mannerisms, the people he encountered, and most especially how his father remained a formidable presence in his young life. It contains not only Kierkegaard's own reflections and perspectives on his childhood years, but also of testimonies made by his kindred and other people who were close to him at the time, both of which the chapter reveals to ensure a fuller portrait of Kierkegaard's early life. Finally, the chapter relates an excerpt from Kierkegaard's Stages On Life's Way (1845), entitled “The Quiet Despair.”

Works from the interwar and immediate post–World War II period, when everyone in Britain was supposed to be thoroughly disillusioned with the conflict, demonstrate that in fact the narrative of the war was still at this point hotly disputed, and remained so through the late 1950s. Memoirs, treatises, novels, general histories, and polemics all took different attitudes toward the war, and the truce was an important part of this contested narrative: some dismissed it as a mere curiosity, while others contended that the cease-fire signified an important moral about the conflict.

The introduction explores reasons for the relative scholarly neglect of Lewis Milestone and his films: his diverse body of work, his troubles during the Blacklist period, the serious nature of most of his films, his difficulty getting along with studio bosses, his distaste for the “star system,” changing Hollywood tastes. It provides an overview of his career, from the silent to the sound era, and his huge early success with All Quiet on the Western Front, which came to haunt him in later years. Milestone was drawn repeatedly to the theme of war, especially its impact on ordinary soldiers. Also discussed is how Milestone’s life embodies the “rag-to-riches” American dream of millions of immigrants.

The subject of this chapter is the Oscar-winning film All Quiet on the Western Front. After discussion of why the Laemmle family’s Universal Studios wanted to make film of Erich Maria Remarque’s celebrated novel, the chapter considers the screenplay adaptation, casting of Lew Ayres in leading role, the revolutionary sound design, influence of Sergei Eisenstein’s montage technique, reception and political reaction to the film in the United States, and changing attitudes towards World War I. The final section focuses on the hostile reception of the film in Germany, where it was used by the Nazi leaders, especially Joseph Goebbels, for propaganda purposes, and how the film’s global renown changed Milestone’s life.

This chapter discusses the esthetics in Soviet operas, with particular emphasis on Kirill Molchanov's Zori zdes' tikhiye (The Dawns Are Quiet Here). The American première of The Dawns Are Quiet Here was held at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City in July 1975. The opera derives its inspiration from the “Great Patriotic War” of 1941–45, and the Tolstoyan roots of “socialist realist” esthetics can be observed in it. The precedents of social realist esthetics of Soviet art and literature can be found in the late esthetic tracts of Leo Tolstoy, particularly in his insistence upon the preeminence of moral import as a criterion of esthetic worth. All art, Tolstoy asserted, must contain the Good and the Important. If these are present, a given work is “moral” and satisfies one of Tolstoy's three criteria for consideration as art, the other two being intelligibility and sincerity. The chapter argues that the socialist realist esthetics was not rooted in the Marxian esthetics, and discusses the impact of socialist realist esthetics in Molchanov's opera.

This chapter takes a look at the Asian Cold War. It studies Graham Greene's The Quiet American, which is often praised for its insight into the American involvement in Indochina. It also considers Mary McCarthy's The Seventeenth Degree, which is a collection of her experiences in Asia during the Cold War.

Chapter 2 examines Malnak v. Yogi(1979), the first federal appellate case to scrutinize under the Establishment Clause meditation practices from a religion other than Christianity. Malnak found that a New Jersey elective high-school course in the Science of Creative Intelligence/Transcendental Meditation (SCI/TM) was “religious” despite being marketed as “science.” A concurring opinion by Judge Arlin Adams articulated criteria for identifying “religion.” Malnak analyzed the textbook written by Indian-born Hindu Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (c. 1918–2008) and chants used in the pūjā ceremony—which involves prayers for aid from deities, bowing, and offerings to the deified Guru Dev—where students received a secret Sanskritmantra, identified by Maharishi as “mantras of personal gods.” Following Malnak, TM was rebranded as “TM/Quiet Time” and, although students still receive secret Sanskrit mantras in a pūjā, TM continues to be taught in public schools with funding from the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. Because Malnak identified “religion” through belief statements, subtracting the textbook and adding scientific studies deflected attention from how the practice of mantra meditation might encourage acceptance of metaphysical beliefs. The chapter argues that secularly framed programs may be more efficacious than overtly religious programs in promoting religion.

Montreal began the twentieth century as Canada’s primary city, its major port with an emerging industrial sector, ruled by an Anglophone Protestant elite while populated by a Francophone Catholic majority—the two solitudes. Diverse European immigrant communities created a third solitude, producing a city of complex communities. Linguistic and educational segregations drew newcomers to difficult choices. The city juggled its diversity through the depression; World War II and early cold war times brought prosperity. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 ended Montreal’s primacy; Toronto rose to become Canada’s financial and industrial capital—while the Quiet Revolution for Francophone rights in Quebec propelled Montreal to become a more regional cultural capital. That movement helped Montreal protect key industries while immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Islamic world created new ethnic diversity. Urban processes mixing separations, aggregations, and integrations allowed Montreal to grow through urban sprawl and keep solid prosperity, fair distributions, and open opportunities, limiting marginalities.

This chapter discusses the novel “The Quiet Don” and the controversy over its authorship. It briefly recounts some of the relevant events of World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Russian Civil War. The chapter focuses on Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov who was awarded by the Nobel Committee in 1945 for the literature prize on his magnum opus, the four-volume The Quiet Don. It also looks into the initial claim that Sholokhov stole the book manuscript for The Quiet Don in a map case that belonged to a White Guard who had been killed in battle. It talks about an anonymous author known as Irina Medvedeva-Tomashevskaia, who wrote several historical studies and claimed that Sholokhov had plagiarized an unpublished manuscript of Fedor Dmitrievich Kriukov.

From their first hit, “Shout,” in 1959, to their number one album Body Kiss in 2003, the Isley Brothers were a constant presence in pop music. Yet their career contains two divergent narratives: a period of crossover success, linked to rock and roll and Top 40, followed by a period of success crossing back to a largely African American audience separated from whites by the rock/soul split. The Isley Brothers remained successful in this latter phase by connecting themselves to Columbia Records and a corporate version of soul culture, which included alongside black music divisions of major record labels the reinvention of R&B radio as formatted “urban contemporary.” Here, and most specifically in relationship to the ballads subformat of R&B known as “Quiet Storm,” black culture became a mediated ritual that crossed new separations: between African Americans divided by economic class and the exodus by some blacks from inner city struggles celebrated in hip-hop. The Isleys illustrate the long history of rhythm and blues in relationship to what Guthrie Ramsey has called Afromodernism: the ideal of reconciling southern agrarian and northern urban black culture, sacred and secular, gutbucket funkiness and Ebony magazine classiness.

This introduction establishes how a quieter conception of testimony emerges from nineteenth-century American literature, how it reorients the terms through which scholars assess the significance of canonical American writing, and how it differs from post-Holocaust theories of testimony (especially those of Shoshana Felman, Cathy Caruth, and Giorgio Agamben). Testimony is defined as text that changes how its addressee perceives the world. A literary, as opposed to a historical or informational, approach to testimony is outlined with particular reference to anti-slavery testimony and testimonial accounts of volunteers in the Civil War.

Chapter 3 analyzes debates about the traditional representation of the Saint and the parades in his honor. As the site of performance and subversion of an established national narrative embodied in the saint, parades providing the stage for the spectacular articulation of new secular national identity in the 1960s. Because St. John the Baptist embodied the dominant national vision, and the celebrations on his name day pictorially narrated that vision in elaborate allegorical floats and tableaux vivants moving through public space, the saint became the object of protests through which social actors and political contenders performed and ultimately transformed their national identity in the 1960s. The vehicle of these protests was the parade itself. The material form of the saint and of his core attributes fomented a debate about national identity and religion in the public sphere, and the altering of the physical aspect of the icon—its iconoclastic unmaking through what I call an aesthetic revolt—was a turning point in the articulation of a new, secular national identity in Québec.

In this chapter, filmmaker Adam Roberts discusses three of his films, Hands (1995), blue yellow (1995) and Pieces of the Quiet Dance (2006). Meditating on the intimate relationship between the filmmaker and dancers in movement, he touches upon recurrent influences or concerns in his work, including carved funerary objects (‘stelae’), still life versus portraiture, and the forest glade as a cleared space (a space made and filled with light). In his films, he explains, the body of the filmed dancer is apprehended as a storehouse of infinite potential, a gesture into the past and the future. To film the human figure, he asserts, is to unveil a body in all its virtuality, in a celebration of the moment of discovery.

This chapter maps the neglected history of quiet fictions and speculates about the potentiality of quiet as a literary aesthetic. It argues that the introvert was a disruptive presence in many nineteenth-century American texts, including those by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville where quiet is associated with a failure to speak or an absence of mind. In the early twentieth century, quiet protagonists were integral to the ‘novel of consciousness’ favoured by many writers including Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust who equated quietness of character with a rich and dramatic internal life. Yet, as the century developed, quiet became marginalised within a Western culture that seemed increasingly defined by its noise and sources of overstimulation. This chapter therefore concludes with a discussion of quiet’s potentiality as both an aesthetic and as a mode of engagement with contemporary fiction.

This chapter engages with the problem of ‘event’ as a noisy narrative device and discusses the opposition of quiet texts to narratives written in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, an event that heralded to many the beginning of a noisy century. Exploring the dynamic between loud and quiet modes of writing, this chapter argues that noise is often favoured in situations that seem to be unprecedented and that the residual association of quiet with silence is, then, an important factor in the former’s continued association with inaction.

This chapter discusses the subjective depictions of temporality portrayed in the fiction of Marilynne Robinson and Paul Harding. Examining the discrepancy between the prize-winning success of quiet fiction and critical surprise at the trend’s existence, it suggests, first, that quiet fiction meets four key criteria and, second, that a quiet novel where very little happens is otherwise liberated from the linear representation of time.