Starting in the 1980s, filmmakers from Maghrebi immigrant families began to represent themselves and their daily lives. They revealed the discrimination they experienced and the problems arising from an identity crisis within French society. This chapter highlights the idiosyncratic ways and cinematic techniques used by the filmmaker to draw the portraits of three North African immigrants or Maghrebi-French youths, showing their personalities, their journey and their quest, and the communities in which they live.It examines the different cultural allusions deployed by the filmmaker, who chooses to anchor his characters in a composite intercultural field based on literary intertexts and allusions. This releases the protagonists from the chains of ethnic clichés and opens the door to an alternate reality. In his first film, La Faute à Voltaire, Abdellatif Kechiche portrays Jallel, a young Tunisian man, who entered France without papers, thus living there illegally.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book defines quiet as an aesthetic of narrative that is driven by reflective principles and places Marilynne Robinson within a vibrant contemporary American trend. To accommodate and link a wide range of texts and themes, the author identifies four common features that unite the quiet American novel in its contemporary form. First, the quiet novel represents the life of a quiet protagonist and an introvert. Second, the protagonist will seek out quiet spaces in which to pursue quiet activities. Third, consciousness will be a central character or a theme, providing a catalyst for narrative action that is independent of national or topical event. Fourth, and most important of all, is this central claim: the quiet novel is a novel where very little happens.

Many later nineteenth-century English accounts of Torquato Tasso's life began to focus on less positive aspects of his family inheritance, and became increasingly critical in their approach to apparent defects in the poet's character. Tasso's early years with his mother in Sorrento and Naples, and especially his terminal separation from her in 1554 became a source of great interest to English biographers. Tasso's epic predecessor Ariosto is only the first of a series of potential father substitutes in Margaret Ferguson's analysis, which encompasses both historical figures, such as the Duke of Ferrara, and the poet's own fictional creations in the Gerusalemme liberata. If Tasso initially plays Hamlet to Ariosto's 'usurper, a Claudius figure', then he must also assume the role of one of his own Christian epic heroes to make sense of these other literary figurations.

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book discusses the issues related to the mimetic and transformative powers of literature and film. It examines literary works and films that help deflate stereotypes regarding France's post-immigration population, and promote a new respect for cultural and ethnic minorities. The book highlights the overall renewal of literary and cultural production initiated by post-beur and post-colonial authors with roots in North Africa. It explores a postmemorial methodology intended to correct the foreclosures of French memory through the reading of multiple fictional representations of a significant event of Algerian decolonization. The book demonstrates cinema's potential to rewrite, complement, and fill in the epistemological gaps of the official historical discourse. It describes a new, international type of immigration from the global South caused by a broader form of neo-imperialism.

Spenser's use of Tasso in his creation of the Bowre of Blisse has been acknowledged by critics for well over a century now. Following the contemporaneous discoveries of the German scholar Emil Koeppel, however, Spenser's prolonged engagement with the episode in Torquato Tasso's epic. Ellsworth Cory emphasises both the 'celestial thieving' from Tasso and the 'incomparable originality' of Spenser's Bowre, urging his readers to 'turn to the original and see how Spenser has translated' Tasso's poem. The powerful pictorial quality of the poetry describing the Bowre of Blisse has often been approached in relation to the equivalent visual allure of Armida's enchanted domain in Tasso: Armida's garden and the Bower of Blisse are constructed primarily as pictures appealing to the senses visually. A closer examination of Tasso's ekphrastic description reveals that Spenser was drawn to a moment of exactly a kind of 'representational friction' in his source.

Many of those who managed to flee to France found themselves isolated in temporary housing camps, felt abandoned by the French, and were often rejected by Algerian immigrants who had supported the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). The presence of the harkis in France first manifested itself in the public arena in other domains. The presence of harkis in films made before 2000 reflects the different phases of harki activism and literary production and presents interesting parallels with the nature and evolution of films on the Algerian War in general. Few fiction films depicting the war were made in the 1980s and 1990s, and the harkis generally played only a very minor role in those produced by majority-French directors. It remains to be seen whether any films made in the coming years will propose alternative scripts or delineate different ways of being a harki in France.

This chapter explains the coordinated terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 as culturally dissonant in both a real and metaphorical sense. It argues that the literary response to '9/11' represents a dismissal of reflection, calm and quiet and an attempt to meet the loud timbre of public tragedy with yet more noise. The chapter also argues that the teleological implications alluded to by Homi K. Bhaba and Jacques Derrida are inherent in the association of the present with unprecedented levels of noise. Contrary to the idea of its singularity, the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 resonated with a broader, cultural noise that extended many pre-existing ideas about the experience of postmodernity and media culture. The events of 2001 seemed to loudly announce the twenty-first century but were contrarily articulated as a singular event that had captured the noise of the culture.

In Henry Layng's biography Tasso emerges above all as a victim of forces beyond his own control. For him, Tasso's literary immortality is in no doubt, even as interest in the poet starts to switch from his work towards the unhappy events of his life. The dramatic potential inherent in the act of betrayal and the challenge was taken up by Goethe in a pivotal scene of his play Torquato Tasso, completed in 1790. Layng concludes his 'Life' with a sympathetic account of the poet's mental torment. While suggesting that 'Tasso had from a child a spice of madness in his constitution', he attributes the steady decline of his mind directly to his fall from court favour and the period of prolonged imprisonment. As attention in England was beginning to switch away from the earlier fascination with Tasso's imprisonment and troubled love towards a new focus on his familial relationships.

This chapter first examines historical and cultural notions of urban noise and asks how Teju Cole and Ben Lerner integrate the din of the city into the body of their quiet texts. It then explores what kinds of information can be read as quiet and what exactly determines a novel's volume. The terms of the author's quiet aesthetic are applied to close readings of Open City and Leaving the Atocha Station with brief consideration of Every Day is for the Thief (2007; 2014) and 10:04 (2014). Building on the four quiet criteria prioritised throughout this book, the chapter argues that all four texts privilege the depiction of quiet characters, locations and interior life. It concludes by reflecting on the relationship between the principles of the author's quiet aesthetic, the novel form and the act of walking.

This chapter examines the discrepancy between the prize-winning success of quiet fiction and repeated critical surprise at the trend's existence. Through analysis of texts by Marilynne Robinson and Paul Harding, the chapter makes two propositions about what quiet fiction might be in its contemporary American form. First, it defines quiet as a narrative aesthetic through analysis of Robinson's Gilead and its partner novels, Home and Lila. Building on the aesthetic conditions, the author reads each text for four quiet criteria and argues that a quiet text privileges the depiction of quiet characters, locations and interior life. The second strand deals with time and temporality in Robinson's and Harding's quiet texts. A quiet novel where narrative duration is based on the movement of thought and the invocation of memory is liberated, the author argues from the linear representation of time and otherwise committed to the portrayal of subjective experience.

This chapter examines how the encounter between the three old Maghrebi men and the main protagonist, Souhad, disturbs their socially preordained, negative trajectory. She embarks with them on a 'road trip' to retrace their steps by traveling from Saint Denis to Algeria via Marseille. Samuel Zaoui's fictionalized oral history, à la Jacques Le Goff, explores the trope of the return to the ancestral land and the simultaneous journey of self-discovery: revenir pour devenir. The chapter focuses on how the contemporary French novel rewrites memories of immigration in France to focus on new possibilities for reconciliation, as the genre itself may become a 'place of memory'. The road trip that lies at the heart of the novel is planned by the protagonists and will help reconstruct history, which in turn will allow for the construction of an appeased collective memory.

This chapter examines how Faïza Guène, Saphia Azzeddine and Nadia Bouzid exceed the literary confines of appellations such as minority literature, decentered literature, literature of the margins, exile literature, and banlieue literature. It demonstrates how the novels seek 'to be grounded and not simply "deterritorialized" or "deterritorializing" for that matter' in a literary landscape that does not pertain to a minority literature, but to literature at large. In France, areas containing relatively large concentrations of residents of foreign origin are almost always multi-ethnic. The stereotype of the Maghrebi-French family order is revisited to offer readers a totally different view of who Maghrebi-French people are nowadays. Azzeddine replaces exclusionary and confrontational identity politics with fluid cultural and identity positions which are adopted or relinquished according to the circumstances but in any case are not pitted against one another.

This chapter explores the writing of Tom McCarthy andsituates him as one of the exciting experimentalvoices of contemporary British writing that isseeking to explore the limits and tolerances of therealistic. The chapter situates McCarthy within thenotion of the contemporary avant-garde novel andcontextualises his fictional writing alongside hisnon-fiction and his work as a conceptual artist.This is followed by close analysis of his fiction upto Satin Island (2015). McCarthy’s writing absorbsthe cultural novelty of digital convergence,channelling the technological sublime of the 21stcentury back into the shell of the realist novel toexamine the extent to which it any longer hasrepresentational credibility.

Rengaine, Rachid Djaïdani's first feature-length film not only expands on 1980s and 1990s works by Maghrebi-French directors, but is quite original in the themes it tackles. Indeed, if Djaïdani's film shares 'a concern with the place and identity of the marginal and excluded in France', it innovates through its focus on minority racism and its treatment of identity construction. The original choice of telling a philosophical tale to discuss real and urgent sociocultural issues and bridge over cultural, religious, ethnic, and gender differences is a reflection of Rachid Djaïdani's personal and professional heterogeneous profile. This chapter discusses the friction of the two paths and the meaning of the 'tale' Rengaine. Djaïdani's criticism of racist and heteronormative discourse falls within the heated debate about the legalization of homosexual marriage in France.

This conclusion presents some concluding thoughts on the key concepts discussed in this book. The book argues that 'quiet' is a literary aesthetic, used frequently in contemporary American fiction to privilege reflection and contemplation as a way of engaging with the present. The book also argues that narrative depictions of '9/11' fixate on three forms of noise. These forms include the literal noise of the World Trade Center collapse, the global resonance of American exceptionalism and the symbolic noise of the event as a temporal structure. The book then examines the streets of New York in Open City (2011), a novel published a decade after the attacks. Finally, the quiet novel can be understood as to a growing interest in quiet activities that are couched as an anomalous force within a late capitalistic system, particularly in wider cultural movements that challenge the information and values receiving ways.