Melancholies of Knowledge: Literature in the Age of Science

· State University of New York Press
Ebook
205
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

"We need the integration of our disciplines, the end to false dichotomizations, the recognition that we cannot grasp human uniqueness until we both practice art and understand science. We must celebrate a novelist who can teach scientists so much about evolution with a literary ploy rooted in anachronism—and we must tolerate a scientist who chooses to pay his respects by writing for a book of literary criticism." –-from the essay by Stephen Jay Gould

Offering interdisciplinary criticism and methodology, Melancholies of Knowledge includes essays by scientists, social scientists, and literary critics on the work of the French novelist Michel Rio. It provides a non-specialist's description of the most important scientific changes in the century—easily understandable and related to issues of concern in the humanities—as well as an opportunity to see how these scientific changes are being incorporated into literary discourse, into the human element outside of theory or the laboratory. In presenting a new methodology that proposes true interdisciplinarity, Melancholies of Knowledge identifies a new class of contemporary fiction and, as a test case, provides the first serious criticism of a major contemporary French author.

About the author

Margery Arent Safir is Professor of Comparative Literature, The American University of Paris. Her previous publications include Earth Tones: The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (with Manuel Duran); A Woman of Letters; and Archipelago (a translation of the novel by Michel Rio).

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