Preface The occasion of this volume is Winfried Fluck’s eightieth birthday. The form we have chosen to celebrate his life and work - the dialogue - combines the formats of the two earlier volumes we have edited in his honor. Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies, from 2009, republished twenty-one of Fluck’s most seminal essays, ranging from early works to what were then very recent pieces. Our idea for that volume was to map both the impressive scope and the conceptual rigor of Fluck’s universe of thought. Selecting the essays that went into Romance with America? was daunting, if only for the fact that (re-)reading everything Fluck had published in essay form (roughly 125 articles by that time) amounted to a colossal task. It also created a first opportunity for real collaboration with a scholar whom both of us deeply admired, with email exchanges on editorial matters late into the night. The later the night, the more casual the emails became. And the longer we worked together, the more perplexed we became: Did our “boss” ever sleep? After months of intense collaboration, we were rewarded (and, to an extent, also challenged) by being offered the German “Du” (we hadn’t expected to enter into this informality before finishing our habilitations). The book that was the result of these efforts came out right in time for the conference “Imagining Culture: Norms and Forms of Public Discourse in America,” hosted by the John F. Kennedy Institute of Freie Universität Berlin in the summer of 2009 to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. The second volume that we published in Fluck’s honor, and for which we were joined by our treasured colleague Ramón Saldívar, grew out of this gathering. The Imaginary and It Worlds: American Studies After the Transnational Turn, from 2011, is a collection of essays by colleagues and companions of Fluck’s that explore the imaginary - one of the concepts most central to his work - in the context of the transnational turn that had just recently reorganized the field of American studies. Though the publisher - the now defunct University Press of New England - didn’t allow us to call it that, The Imaginary and Its Worlds was in effect a classic Festschrift. The present volume, finally, consists of twelve dialogues on key topics of American studies, each including a republished essay by Fluck, the earliest of which dates back to 1990, and a response by an esteemed colleague and companion written specifically for this occasion. We have chosen essays that convey a sense of his ever broadening interests and that were not included in Romance with America? Several of the included pieces were in fact written after the publication of the earlier volume. For the responses, we have asked friends and colleagues from different parts of the world who met Fluck in different roles and at different points of their lives. Among our contributors are colleagues of Fluck’s generation who met him - in many cases in the United States - early on in their careers. We are also joined in this collection by some of his companions from Germany who have journeyed with him through roughly a half century of American studies. Then there are his students and mentees from several generations, who have in the meantime enjoyed academic careers of their own. And finally, there are those colleagues who, while never having formally worked or studied with Fluck, have nonetheless created bonds of affinity over the years, both in Germany and abroad. It’s a very illustrious group of interlocutors, to be sure, and we are grateful that each and every one among them has carefully and thoughtfully devised their own method of responding to what is surely one of the field-defining voices in the history of American studies. That the present book is published as a volume of the Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) could not be more fitting. Winfried Fluck joined its editorial board in 1993 (at the time his co-editors were Herbert Grabes and Jürgen Schläger) and served as the board’s senior member up until this past year. The present set of dialogues, then, celebrates not only the career of a premier scholar but also of an editor who helped shape an important publication of English and American literary studies for three decades. We thank Kanu Alexander Shenoi, Tom Freischläger, Talia Houser, and Lorena Nauschnegg for their tireless commitment in editing and formatting the manuscript. Likewise, we are grateful to Kathrin Heyng and Lena Fleper at Narr Verlag for facilitating a swift and seamless production process. And we are happy to report that while Winfried Fluck goes about the business of American studies as energetically and enthusiastically as ever, fifteen years into his retirement his working and sleeping hours have finally adjusted to what ought to be considered normal. Even so, it has been our pleasure to have the opportunity to closely collaborate with him on this volume once more. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz Berlin, Bochum, Frankfurt, February 2024 8 Preface