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Scholars in the exact and social sciences join literary critics to consider the work of French author Michel Rio and to reflect on literature's place in intellectual discourse in an age dominated by science.

"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.