Introduction

41 Special Supplement The Achievement of John Berger 42 the minnesota review Introduction As Bruce Robbins points out at the beginning of the essay printed below, John Berger's writing has over the years been a frequent subject for discussion in these pages. Perhaps understandably, given the constraints upon our corner of the contemporary literary mode of production, the attention he has received heretofore has been mostly occasional. Surely, however, as Berger's corpus now stretches over a considerable span of years and incorporates such a variety of genres and modes, the time has come for more sustained consideration. In bringing together the set of essays by Bruce Robbins, Pamela McCallum, Peter De Bolla, and Bill Quillian, along with one of Berger's most recent pieces of fiction, we have tried to approach the varied richness of Berger's writing from several directions , some frankly critical or skeptical about the trajectory of his career, others more positive that Berger's way has not only been honest and reasoned—no one ever doubted that—but indeed socially and politically productive. By a happy coincidence, this issue of mr appears shortly after the publication of the first book-length study of Berger's work (reviewed, along with some recent works by Berger himself, at the outset of the review section below). It would seem that both in Britain and here in the U.S., the "time of John Berger" has finally arrived, as his writings have passed into channels of distribution for large-scale commercial publishing. Doubtless Berger himselfmust consider this development with some irony, but for our part, we are only too grateful for Pantheon Books' efforts on his behalf. Speaking to a wider public can never be, in itself, a bad thing for a socialist writer. Perhaps now others will endorse what the editors of mr have believed for a long time: that John Berger is among the most distinguished socialist writers in the English-speaking world. ...