This book contains a selection of papers presented at a three-day 2008 conference in Paris organized by the research centre Littératures, Savoirs et Arts and the doctoral school of French and comparative literature at Paris III. The title may give the impression that this is a comparative project, but in reality it is to a large extent a French affair. Both editors are professors of French literature and so are most of the contributors; the emphasis throughout is on French writers and their works, with only the occasional excursion into foreign (mostly German) lands.
In the introduction Pascale Alexandre-Bergues and Jeanyves Guérin describe the long tradition of the representation in literature of scholars and scientists (they refer to Julien Benda's general term "clerc"), starting in Greece with the figure of Prometheus in the tragedies and with characters like Theaetetus in Plato's dialogues, but also, more critically, with the figure of Socrates who is made fun of by Aristophanes. The social status of philosophers and writers was never secure and it cannot come as a surprise when we are told that it is mainly in literature that we find a representation of that always problematic status. The editors do not seem to have managed more of an overall theme in the materials available to them.
Maud Perez-Simon compares a number of early and medieval attempts to reconstruct the missing correspondence between Aristotle and his pupil Alexander, juxtaposing the contemplative and the active life. Alice Vintenon looks at the figure of the laughing philosopher Democritus in a number of humanist writers to conclude that the "enigmatic and polysemic" figure is an emblem for the different approaches to the truth available in the renaissance (49). We then move on to Peter Frei's discussion of Rabelais's juxtaposition of knowledge and obscenity in the Tiers livre. With Cardano we finally but briefly move out of France to Italy: Caroline Trotot reads the Latin autobiography of the Pavian polymath against its dismissal by Philippe Lejeune in his study of modern autobiography. With some help from Michel Foucault's redefinition of the notion of the author, she stresses that the lack of a coherent framework in the autobiography (deplored by Lejeune) is precisely the strength of Cardano's attempt to speak his divided self as a renaissance scholar.
Ariane Bayle looks at the figure of the "empirical" medical doctor in a number of sixteenth and seventeenth century novels (Grimmelhausen, Rabelais) and Véronique Adam at portraits of the alchemist, showing that the representation of (the representatives of) this disputed field of knowledge is in many ways similar to the equally disputed profession of the writer himself. Nancy Oddo reads a less known baroque novel by Antoine Domayron in which the erudite hero discovers a castle and a seat of the muses where an honorable academy educates young men and women in all the arts and sciences (with alchemy as just one of the many fields of study). Antoinette Gimaret then looks at the ways in which in the seventeenth century the new form of medical discourse struggled to develop a language to speak of demonic possession. Philippe Chométy, in the same century, then shows how the celebration of philosophers and scientists in poetic forms was part of an ethical and apologetic discourse that would disappear in the Enlightenment. The beginning of the Enlightenment is also the focus of Catriona Seth's look at the figure of the medical doctors in poetry and fiction, in which she finds the emergence of a "mediatized" form of medicine in which fashion plays an important role.
In the next section we move to the nineteenth century with Hugues Marchal's study of the hybrid self-portraits of the last generation of poet-scientists, a combination of competences that had been standard but that became exceedingly rare by the end of the century in the new era of professional scientists and poets. Nicholas Wanlin looks at the problematic nature of the illustrations that accompany the last examples of this form of scientific poetry and Bertrand Marquer compares three different incarnations of the figure of what Guy de Maupassant called "un halluciné raisonnant" (239) in works by Charles Nodier, Théophile Gautier and Maupassant himself. Adélaïde Jacquemard compares the magus and the engineer in the work of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Marie-France David De Palacio closes the section with a comparison between French and German portraits of teachers of Latin between 1850 and 1918.
In the twentieth century Cécile Leblanc strays a bit from the general topic by looking at a writer/musician who in a novel by Henri Céard attempts to create a Wagnerian total work of art, Pascale Alexandre-Bergues herself then tackles the figure of the poet/professor in Claudel's drama. Laurence Dahan-Gaida then compares the figure of the scholar in Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and Paul Valéry's Cahiers and Jean-Claude Larrat focuses on the figures of the teacher in a novel by Louis Guilloux. Jeanuves Guérin looks at the wise man in French twentieth-century theatre and André-Alain Morello, Yannick Hoffert and Alexandra Roux examine, respectively, science or scientists in Julien Gracq, Jacques Audiberti and Julien Green.
In their brief introduction the editors write twice that with this selection of studies the field is by no means exhausted, but in a comparative study it might have been preferable to aim for at least a modest degree of geographic, linguistic and cultural spread, both in terms of the kinds of authors studied and in the frame of reference in which they are discussed. This is a collection of critical essays on texts that have very little in common, apart from a thematic focus on scientists or scholars. There is no discernible argument and in no way does the book add up to more than the sum of its parts.