Since its origin, American literature has always had an uneasy relationship with science: born at a time when science was becoming a profession, it repeatedly referred to it, implicitly or explicitly, in order to assert its difference or, on the contrary, to gain a certain form of legitimacy. The purpose of this book is to show how scientific discourse informs literary writing, and to consider the relationship the two types of discourse have maintained: mutual metaphorization, questioning or legitimating. Focusing on the literary production of the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries, the book is organized in four parts: the first one, which concerns the works of Henry Adams and Thomas Pynchon, examines the way in which literature writes a history of science; the second deals with the relationship between literature and the developing field of neurosciences, first from a theoretical perspective, then through the study of science-fiction novels; the third one includes essays which, one way or another, raise the issue of the ethics of science and offer a literary answer to the dilemmas raised by scientific progress; the two essays in the last part analyze how digital technology has influenced recent American writing and the consequences of this new mode on reading procedures.
About the Author: Claire Maniez is a Professor of American Literature at Stendhal University-Grenoble 3, France, specializing in contemporary American metafiction and in translation studies. She has published a monograph on William H. Gass, as well as numerous articles on contemporary writers (Gass, Gaddis, Carver, Auster). She had co-edited several volumes on American literature, most recently Discours et objets scientifiques dans l'imaginaire americain du XIXe siecle (Ellug, 2010). Ronan Ludot-Vlasak is an Associate Professor of American Literature at Stendhal University-Grenoble 3, France. He has published a range of articles on the use of Shakespeare in 19th-century American literature and in contemporary culture. He has also co-authored Le Roman americain (Presses Universitaires de France, 2011) and co-edited a volume on science and 19th-century American literature. Frederic Dumas is an Associate Professor of American Literature at Stendhal University-Grenoble 3, France. He has published a book on Nelson Algren (L'Harmattan, 2001) and many articles on American literature in French, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Indian and American scholarly publications. He is currently working on a monograph on Mark Twain's aesthetics.