Today, the humanities seem severed from the sciences. Writers, artists and the ordinary thinking citizen cannot readily understand the sciences that have reshaped modern life. Scientists in turn, find critical theory difficult and elusive. Drawing on recent semiotic and post-structural approaches to the text, Damien Broderick provides a critical introduction to recent efforts to construct an interdisciplinary analysis of the "two cultures", literature and science. He finds literary theorists deficient in scientific rigour, and would like scientists to acquire the linguistic sophistication of humanists and their post-modern successors. Both literary theories and scientific practices, he concludes, are deeply implicated in social contexts.