Melchanolies of Knowledge: Literature in the Age of Science (SUNY Series, Margins of Literature)

Offering interdisciplinary criticism and methodology, this book includes essays by scientists, social scientists, and literary critics on the work of the French novelist Michel Rio. Contributors include Stephen Jay Gould, world-renowned biologist and best-selling science writer; James Ritter, editor of the Einstein papers, physicist, and historian of science; Michel Pastoureau, France’s celebrated medieval historian; Joaquin Galarza, Mexican anthropologist and discoverer of Aztec pictograms as a writing system (“The Champollion of Aztec letters”) Christian Metz, internationally recognized semiologist and the founder of semiology of cinema; and literary scholars Jean-Michel Rabate, James Swenson, and Margery Arent Safir. Melancholies of Knowledge offers 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. The book provides an opportunity to see how these scientific changes are being incorporated into literary discourse, into the human element outside of theory or the laboratory. It also presents a test case of a new methodology that proposes true interdisciplinarity and that criticizes in an unabashed form many of the conventional methodologies in the field. 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.