Melancholies of Knowledge

Literature in the Age of Science (Margins of Literature

By Stephen Jay Gould

1995

First Published

3.67

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205

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6H13M

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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.

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Author

Stephen Jay Gould

Author · 34 books

Stephen Jay Gould was a prominent American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Most of Gould's empirical research was on land snails. Gould helped develop the theory of punctuated equilibrium, in which evolutionary stability is marked by instances of rapid change. He contributed to evolutionary developmental biology. In evolutionary theory, he opposed strict selectionism, sociobiology as applied to humans, and evolutionary psychology. He campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and religion should be considered two compatible, complementary fields, or "magisteria," whose authority does not overlap. Many of Gould's essays were reprinted in collected volumes, such as Ever Since Darwin and The Panda's Thumb, while his popular treatises included books such as The Mismeasure of Man, Wonderful Life and Full House. -Wikipedia