Anthologies of literary theory, the backbone of courses on literary criticism, rely on viktor Shklovsky's “Art as a Device” or Boris Eikhenbaum's “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method‘” to broach the subject of Russian formalism. The canonical status of these essays is well deserved. Written when the author was merely twenty-four, Shklovsky's 1917 essay bristles with a polemical fervor, wit, and knack for example that announce him as a critical prodigy. Marked by the mixture of embittered pride, rigor, and self-conscious malaise typical of later formalism, Eikhenbaum's dense history of the formal school is remarkable for its titanic effort to marry historical considerations to a systematic analysis of the evolution of key formalist doctrines.

The man. Harald Weinrich, an honorary member of the modern language association since 1996, may be the quintessential interdisciplinary humanist. Having mastered French as a young internee in France at the end of World War II, he began his academic career as a Romance philologist in the tradition of Erich Auerbach and Ernst Robert Curtius, with professorships successively at the universities of Kiel and Cologne. In a second career he became a professor of linguistics at the new University of Bielefeld (which he helped to found and where he served as director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research); then he established in Munich the first program for the teaching of German as a foreign language. Following his compulsory retirement, he received the honor (extraordinary for a foreigner) of an appointment as professor of Romance studies at the prestigious Collège de France, from which he is now also retired. He has published writing of great scholarly and public resonance in all these areas. Among his voluminous output (translated into many languages) are Tempus, a wide-ranging and meticulously nuanced study of tense use in the major literatures of Western Europe; a prizewinning short book of cultural linguistics entitled Linguistik der Lüge (Linguistics of Lying); “text grammars” of French and of German that aim to record not just morphology and syntax but also the usage problems that confront speakers and writers of all foreign languages; Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens (Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, his first book to appear in English) and much other work on cultural topics, including memory and politeness; and dozens of essays on the teaching and learning of languages and on problems of intercultural understanding.

Synesthesia … one day in 1997 (soon after the national gallery acquired the picture), i walked up the familiar marble stairs, crossed the rotunda, and was confronted, for the first time, by George Stubbs's Whistlejacket, the stunning, naked portrait—no groom or rider, no landscape—of a chestnut Arabian stallion. I smelled the stable, horse manure, and leather, and I had the thrill of knowing what was happening inside my skull. How the attention response had sent a cloud of fire leaping through my brain, tugging on associated traces, map on map of firing and partially firing neurons springing back into existence (never the same twice, yet continuous with my earliest childhood and the millions of years before that). Surprise and the power of the artist were making me read internal stimulus as external: recall had become once again perception (McCrone 194-217). This is an iconic memory for me. It holds, packed down and ready to unfold, both the direction my work has taken through my career and the context of that work: my own life and times; the history that made me; the Next Big Thing in science; and my privileged, difficult position as a science fiction writer, an arts graduate, and a woman.

For the last three years, roger chartier and i have taught an undergraduate seminar called the history of print Culture in Early Modern Europe and America. Although the content of the course has changed, one feature has been persistent: at least half our classes met in the rare-book libraries of Philadelphia. While we have often held the seminar in Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania, we have also gone to the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Free Library, and the Rosenbach Museum and Library. This would not have been possible without the extraordinary openness and generosity of the Philadelphia libraries and librarians. But the work of those librarians has not only provided an infrastructure for the course; it has also reshaped what we've worked on and how we teach it.

In the dreams our stuff is made of, Thomas M. Disch talks about the influence and pervasiveness of science Fiction in American culture and asserts the genre's power in “such diverse realms as industrial design and marketing, military strategy, sexual mores, foreign policy, and practical epistemology” (11-12). A few years earlier, Sharona Ben-Tov described science fiction as “a peculiarly American dream”—that is, “a dream upon which, as a nation, we act” (2). Recently, Kim Stanley Robinson has claimed that “rapid technological development on all fronts combined to turn our entire social reality into one giant science fiction novel, which we are all writing together in the great collaboration called history” (1-2). While such diagnostic statements may ring true to American ears, they cannot be taken at face value in the context of Hellenic culture. Despite the unprecedented speed with which the Greeks absorb and consume both the latest technologies (like satellite TV, video, CD and DVD players, electronic games, mobile and cordless phones, PCs, and the Internet) and Hollywood's science fiction blockbuster films, neither technology per se nor science fiction has yet saturated the Greek mind-set to a degree that makes daily life a science-fictional reality. Greek politicians do not consult science fiction writers for military strategy and foreign policy decisions or depend on imaginary scenarios to shape their country's future. Contemporary Hellenic culture does not acquire its national pride from mechanical devices or space conquest. Contrary to the American popular belief that technology is the driving force of history, “a virtually autonomous agent of change” (Marx and Smith xi), the Greek view is that a complex interplay of political, economic, cultural, and technoscientific agencies alters the circumstances of daily life. No hostages to technological determinism, modern Greeks increasingly interface with high-tech inventions, but without locating earthly paradise in their geographic territory and without writing their history or shaping their social reality as “one giant science fiction novel.”

The “particular cultural and political circumstances in which i write” have changed decisively several times in my life. I have been several times an expatriate and finally an émigré from Yugoslavia, and I am now an expatriate from Canada—a life that has made me very attuned to global material and moral changes. I shall focus on the changes that I personally felt as inciding deeply into my professional work in the last ten years or so, the watershed for me being the illegal and immoral bombing of Serbia led by the United States. By then I had published three books on science fiction—Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), Victorian Science Fiction in the U.K. (1983), and Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (1988)—and written enough further essays for a fourth book, which was scrapped when the Liverpool University Press had its budget cut. The changes make me, alas, the bearer of bad news, for as I see it our rulers have in practice destroyed the wall that our disciplines wrongly thought existed between culture and political economics, and we had better draw the consequences. And yet the gesture and bearing (see Suvin, “Haltung”) of writing this report also imply a hope that with much clarity, work, and luck we intellectuals—writers and then critics—can make an important difference.