This collection of essays brings together Canadian and European views of Marshall McLuhan in a transatlantic perspective. They were gathered in the spirit of commemorating McLuhan's one hundredth birthday, not in his Canadian birthplace or in the university where he taught for many years, but in the form of a conference organized by a European Canadian Studies centre which is part of the international network of centres meaningfully linked in a way that would have been almost unthinkable without McLuhan's concept of the ‘global village’. Such a transatlantic enterprise is all the more meaningful since McLuhan, al though generally seen as a typical representative of North American media culture, received important parts of his literary education on the European side of the Atlantic Ocean, at the University of Cambridge. Even though Cambridge may have been a shock to him, as the famous dictum quoted by Bernhard J. Dotzler in the title of his essay in this volume suggests, it was also a major influence on his reading and interpreting strategies.

The transatlantic perspective has been shaping the discussion of the impact of technical media on collective cultures over the last decades. Furthering McLuhan's concept of media as underlying organizers of knowledge, the German media scholar Friedrich Kittler widens his literary approach by incorporating writing as a technological adventure – writing and literary contents thus become an effect of technical media.